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Brain-Computer

Interfacing:

From Prosthetic

Limbs to Telepathy Chips u

The Great "Designer Baby"
Controversy of '09 24

10 The Virtual Cocoon

11 Climb Inside a Virtual Sphere

12 Wearing the Internet

13 Oh Rosie, Can You Bring Me My Slippers?

13 Live Long and Heavy

14 Fast Blasts

18 FOREVER YOUNG Smart Biology

20 BIO "Roger Pederson, Won't You Please Come
Home?"

22 ENHANCED: Optogenetics

30 Andy Mian, Sports Doping, and the
Enhancement Enlightement

34 Biology for the Homebody

37 Here Come the Neurobots

40 Unreal Tournament: Was That a Bot or a
Human?

SUMMER 2009

Life on Mars with Pete Worden:

An Interview with the Director of the

O NASA Ames Research Center

The Man Behind
Biosphere 2 ©

42 From X PRIZE to Singularity University: 62 Chris Conte: Cynthetic Series

An Interview with Peter Diamandis

67 Let A Hundred Futures Bloom

50 The Man Behind Biosphere 2:

An Interview with John Allen 70 Everything of the Dead: The Future of

Humanity is Zombie

56 Real Discrimination Against Digital People

78 Recommended Books

58 NANO It's a Big Mistake to Overlook

Mid-Range Dangers 81 HUMOR Relinquishment, Step One

60 NEURO Running with the Dopes: Cheating
to be a Better Human

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Publisher Betterhumans LLC

James Clement - Co-Founder
Dan Stoicescu - Co-Founder

Editor-in-Chief R.U. Sirius
Managing Editor Jay Cornell
Contributing Editor Surfdaddy Orca

Design Infoswell Media, Inc
Art Director Stephanie Fox

Print Distribution Disticor

David Latimer

Advertising James Clement
David Latimer

Contact info@hplusmagazine.com

Letters to the Editor editor@hplusmagazine.com

Proofreading Lori Selke

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h+ Magazine, 385 Vista Roma Way, #115, San Jose, CA
95136

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Please email the editor at editor@hplusmagazine.com

All materials © Betterhumans LLC 2009 unless otherwise
indicated. All copyrights for text revert to writers 90 days
after publication. Date of publication February 2009.

Futurist Heroes

We are privileged to know and to work with many Futurist Heroes.
However, we want to see this league of advocates for a positive future
in which poverty, scarcity, disease, and ignorance are erased from
humanity, grow much larger.

Watching the news as we do, we witness incredible breakthroughs
nearly every week. These are stories that would have been the u story of
the year" if they had happened just a decade ago. But these days, they
are quickly swept aside by the next breaking science story. They seem
to come at ever increasing speeds. In this sense, we are becoming ever
more aware of the implications of Moore's Law being played out in the
U NBIC" (Nano, Bio, Info & Cogno) information Science" fields.

Here at h+ Magazine, we hope that (among other things) we can
inspire young people to study and get involved in the emerging U NBIC"
sciences and technologies so as to help us transcend our genetic/
biological limitations. We're hoping that future generations will be
able to live incredibly long and healthy lifespans without disease, enjoy
higher intelligences (perhaps augmented by computers through brain-
computer interfaces), and generally be more productive and happy.

Join our h+ Community and help bring about this future - become a
Futurist Hero too.

James Clement

Co-Founder

Best wishes,

Dan Stoicescu
Co-Founder

James Clement and Dan Stoicescu
Co-Publishers

RESOURCES

Visit the h+ Community
http://www.hpluscommunity.com

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

PREPA

I have tended to be a little less impressed with the rate of change than perhaps
some other techno-progressives have been. Technology's best promises -
for curing cancer, ending scarcity, insuring mental health - not to mention
the more radical hopes for amplifying neurological function, expanding biological
lifespan, and creating strong problem-solving AI... what have you - have at times
seemed like chimera - the horizons recede just out of reach whenever we seem to
get close. We've all heard those predictions from the optimists in various fields:
u We will have (insert favorite breakthrough here) in five years/ 7 Five years later
what do they say? u We will have this in five years/ 7

But I've been getting substantially more impressed lately. I'm not sure if it's
just because I have the privilege of editing h+ (the magazine and the website), or
if the rate of acceleration is really starting to get interesting, but I suspect that it's
the latter.

Scanning through the news items we've covered on our website over
the last couple of months we find (among many other astonishing
items) that:

Professor Nadrian Seeman has created
two-armed worker robots made of DNA.

An international team has cracked the
mammalian gene control code.

Scientists have used embryonic stem
cells to make synthetic blood.

British scientists have developed the
world's first stem cell therapy to cure
the most common cause of blindness.

REfi

acceleration

RU SIRIUS

And scanning this issue of /?+ Magazine, we find that:

Nanotech researchers have achieved
real-time atom manipulation

Neurobots are manifesting individual
behaviors and vv are just about at the
edge of the amount of size and
complexity found in real brains/'

Genescient expects to soon be
able to make designer supplements
containing nutrients made using
detailed genomic information.

... All this and gamebots are threatening
to pass the Turing Test.

So when I scan the evidence provided by my own magazine and
website, I am, in fact, convinced that fantastic breakthroughs
in NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) are happening all the time
and they are starting to influence our lives. The promises and
potentials for a radically different and (hopefully) far brighter
future implicit in these sciences are moving quickly from
theoretical possibility to laboratory breakthrough to hands-on
practice.

Of course, promises are made to be broken. These hopeful
breakthroughs are running neck and neck with any number
of disaster scenarios. There are two wild cards in this race
between resource/environmental collapse and a new dawn of
health, prosperity, and novelty. One of them is plain dumb luck.
The only thing we can predict about the unpredictable is that
it will surprise us. The other is us. It's going to take a lot of
intelligence and wisdom and social-navigational skill to bring
this accelerating mess of contradictions broadly describable
as the human (or transhuman) condition to a reasonably soft
landing with over 6 billion humans (and many other less crazy
species) on board.

I hope h+ is contributing to that effort. #

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

Virtual Reality

Virtual Cocoon

Tristan Guillford

Researchers from several universities in the
UK have teamed up to develop an immersive
virtual reality headset that stimulates all
five senses. Designed for maximum realism, the
VR helmet will be THEY'RE CALLING IT

:::: " -real virtual™-

surround sound audio, special tubes that spray
simulated tastes and scents into waiting mouths
and noses, a fan that blows air to create hot or cold
temperatures; and tactile devices for simulating
touch.

A mock up of the Virtual Cocoon was
showcased at Pioneers '09 on March 4th, a
technology conference put on by the Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council at London's
Olympia Conference Centre. In a press release by
the EPSRC, project lead David Howard of the
University of York says: "Virtual Reality projects
have typically only focused on one or two of
the five senses — usually sight and hearing.
We're not aware of any other research
group anywhere else in the world doing
what we plan to do."

The researchers estimate that it will
take at least five years before a commercial
model of the Virtual Cocoon is available ,
for purchase. They hope to have it on the
market for about 1,500 pounds, a little more
than $2,500 USD. <§>

SUMMER 2009

CLIMB INSIDE A

For those of you who are tired of
button-mashing and are looking
to take your gaming experience
to a whole new level, or merely looking to
add a little spice to your typical workout,
welcome VirtuSphere, Inc.

After 45 man-years, they have
developed a functional, easy-to-assemble
plastic sphere and base platform that fits
inside a large living room. Just put on
goggles and climb into the sphere, and
you're interacting in the virtual world.

Because you're in a movable sphere,
you can jump, run, crouch, look around,
and walk without having

:::

Photo courtesy of Virtusphere, Inc.

...Finally?

VIRTUAL SPHERE

KRISTI SCOTT

to worry about banging into the couch or being
bitten in the crotch by your excitable pet.
There are currently eighteen of these spheres
up and running in government and academic
locations such as the Office of Naval Research,
the Moscow Government and Olympic Bid
Committee, the A.S. Popov Central Museum
of Communications, St. Petersburg State
University of Telecommunications and the
University of Washington.

VirtuSphere is currently being used
for tourism, architectural design, and
training for dangerous professions, but
it is an attractive invention for the avid
gamer looking to really get their game on.
And for those of us who are shy at the gym,
the VirtuSphere opens up the doors for us to
have a virtual personal trainer in our homes.
Or imagine going for a run on the beach or
on top of the Great Wall of China. Select the
correct program and let your imagination —
and your legs — run wild. <§>

:o by Nadir Chanyshev

RESOURCES ©

Virtuesphere

http://www.virtusphere.com

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

SURFDADDYORCA

ave your hand and the Rolex materializes
on your arm like so much smoke. And
then... poof... it's gone. Open the palm

wearable computing for
some time. "Wearable
computing hopes to shatter

of your hand and suddenly your calendar and phone this myth of how a computer

list overlay your life line. Use your fingers and thumb should be used/ 7 states

to create a picture frame and snap a photo. Check the program's web site,

the latest book reviews on Amazon and display the U A person's computer

results on the pocketbook or newspaper you're should be worn, much as

holding at the airport newsstand. eyeglasses or clothing are

Leave it to students at the MIT Media Lab to worn, and interact with the

develop a wearable computing system that turns user based on the context of

any surface into an interactive display screen. With the situation."
an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M Pattie Maes of the lab's Fluid Interfaces

projector, they attached a mirror and connected group goes one step further. As the leader of a

it to an internet-enabled mobile phone. A mere team of seven graduate students that developed the

$350 of off-the-shelf components and suddenly the system, she characterizes it as somewhat more than

glass window at Macy's, your car door, or your arm a wearable device — she refers to it as a digital

become a computer display. Want to Google the "sixth sense." No, she can't see dead people. But,

latest Dow Jones, Nasdaq, or S&P 500 returns? No as a recent TED demo shows — sans keyboard or

problem, just do a quick search on your shirt sleeve. monitor — she literally has the Internet cloud on her

MIT's Media Lab has explored the idea of arm (and her hands, and...). #

RESOURCES ©

MIT Media Lab

http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/

MIT Fluid Interfaces Group
http://ambient.media.mit.edu

Wired

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/02/
ted-digital-six

SUMMER 2009

Oh Rosie,

Can You Bring Me My Slippers:

SURFDADDYORCA

Rosie, the Jetsons 7 maid robot, is a sweet, nurturing cartoon robot. Not only does
she bring George his slippers, she washes his clothes, teaches his son to dribble
a basketball, and sings while vacuuming the rug.
The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) looks more like tubular shelving
on a Segway than a robotic maid. It finds objects with its stereoscopic camera eyes and
grabs them with a robotic arm. Perhaps not unlike an early model of Rosie, STAIR can
interpret relatively ambiguous vocal commands, navigate around unfamiliar environments
and objects, and solve problems.

U STAIR, please fetch the stapler from the lab/ 7 says a researcher in a recent video.
VV I will go get the stapler for you," replies STAIR. Avoiding obstacles, STAIR wheels into
the next room and scans it looking for the stapler. Grabbing the stapler, it returns to the

researcher. u Here is your stapler/ 7 says STAIR, u Have
a nice day. 77

h+ contributor Ben Goertzel, an organizer of
this year's Second Conference on Artificial General
Intelligence, characterizes general intelligence as
u the ability to solve a variety of complex problems in
a variety of complex environments. 77 STAIR shows the
evolutionary transition that is occurring in artificial
intelligence today — from the narrow AI of expert
systems to more generalized intelligence. As the
STAIR video demonstrates, the multitalented STAIR
walks, talks, sees, hears, and solves problems in an
obstacle-laden lab environment.

Andrew Ng, the assistant professor of computer
science at Stanford who led the development of STAIR,
is optimistic that the many disciplines of AI are now
mature enough to be integrated u to fulfill the grand AI
dream. 77 And no, this is not just a robotic maid to fetch
staplers or slippers, but rather computers that are as
intelligent as people. #

resources ©

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
http://stair.stanford.edu

Computerworld

http://www.computerworld. com/action/article. do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=332273
STAIR Fetches a Stapler Video

http://www.mefeedia.com/entry/stair-fetches-a-stapler/14005507

"The Jetsons" - Rosie the Robot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VyvnzhP2uM

Live Long
and Heavy

STEPHANIE EUIN COBB

Eating foods containing heavier isotopes of
common elements, such as hydrogen, carbon,
nitrogen or oxygen, increases the stability of
proteins. Research indicates this might protect against
the damage caused by free radicals and so reduce the
rate at which a human being ages.

The experiments, conducted by Russian biochemist
Mikhail Shchepinov were first reported in the medical
journal Rejuvenation Research (edited by gerontologist
Dr. Aubrey de Grey) and then featured in New Scientist's
November 29, 2008
issue. According to
Shchepinov, dozens
of experiments have
proved that proteins,
fatty acids and DNA
can be influenced
to resist oxidative
damage with the
isotope effect.

Like regular
water, heavy water's
molecules are
composed of three
atoms arranged like
a boomerang with
oxygen located in the
elbow. But it differs
in that the two atoms
attached to the central
oxygen atom are
deuterium, an isotope
of hydrogen that has
double hydrogen's
mass. Ice cubes made
of heavy water will
sink in ordinary water.

Retrotope, a
company created to
research the isotope
effect and to develop
it into life-extending
products, has been
feeding various

amounts of heavy water to fruit flies. Large amounts
proved deadly, while smaller quantities increased
lifespans up to 30 percent. Dr. de Grey is on Retrotope 7 s
Scientific Advisory Board and Dr. Shchepinov is its co-
founder and Chief Science Officer. €§>

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

* ..-ft

FAST
BLASTS

MICHAEL ANISSIMOV

REAL-TIME ATOM MANIPULATION USING
A HIGH-SPEED AFM

For over twenty years, investigators at the nanoscale have
been using AFMs (atomic force microscopes) to image
individual atoms and push them into stable configurations
on a smooth surface. Now, for the first time, researchers
at the Nanophysics and Soft Matter Group at the University
of Bristol have built an AFM that operates so quickly that
nanofabrication can be conducted in real time. This could
be an important step to future technologies based on mass
nanofabrication.

The group's improved AFM works by selectively
oxidizing silicon to produce a desired pattern. Instead of
conventional AFM tips, which move at about 1-100 |jm/s —
not much faster than the speed of a crawling amoeba — this
new AFM can operate at speeds in excess of 1 cm/s, more
than 10,000 times faster.

The penalty for such rapid operation is a faster
degradation rate for the AFM tip, which is made more durable
by covering it with a platinum coating. Though the AFM has
proven its ability to avoid damaging the nanostructures it is
working on, with no damage observed after more than 250
pass-overs, it did lose manufacturing resolution over the
course of several experiments.

DETAILED MAPS OF HUMAN CORTEX INSPIRED NEUROROBOTS

Olaf Sporns, a professor at Indiana University, represents the leading edge of research into information flow within the brain, and in applying that
knowledge to create neurorobots that learn. Last year, his lab produced the first detailed map of the human cortex using a new and powerful type of brain
imaging called diffusion imaging. This map singled out a "cortical core" in the posterior medial and parietal cerebral cortex, sections of the brain near
the back of the head.

Network studies in fields like computer science and biology suggest that strongly interconnected central nodes often mediate functions responsible
for properties of the entire network. This suggests that the cortical core could be the key to treating cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia,
or for enhancing the human brain's processing ability.

Besides his pioneering work in brain modeling, Dr. Sporns also creates neurorobots piloted by cultures of a few thousand neurons to learn more about
how the human brain processes rewards. (For more on Neurobots, see also "Here Come the Neurobots" in this issue.)

ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES WITH THE
STIFFNESS OF DIAMOND

Ray Baughman is flexing some major artificial muscle. The
muscle he and his colleagues at the University of Texas in
Dallas have designed has so many advantages over past
proposed projects that one wonders how such a major
leap could occur without incremental progress in between.
Baughman's artificial muscle is a ribbon made of tangled
carbon nanotube "aerogel," meaning it is mostly empty
space and weighs little more than its volume in air.

Despite its feather-light weight, the material is stiffer
than diamond in its "long" direction, while stretchy like
rubber in the "wide" direction. It is so stretchy, in fact, that
the application of a modest voltage causes it to widen by
220%. It maintains these properties under an extremely
wide temperature range - from -320.8 °F (-196 °C), the
temperature of liquid nitrogen, to 2,800 °F (1,538 °C ), above
the melting point of iron. No previous attempt at artificial
muscles even comes close to its potential usefulness.

There is one major drawback to these artificial muscles
in their current form, however — they're only as strong as
human muscle by weight, meaning that a truly practical
version would need to be much denser, or have substantially
more volume.

MYELIN INTEGRITY IS KEY
CONTRIBUTING FACTOR IN INTELLIGENCE

Using a powerful new extension of fMRI technology called
HARDI, scientist Paul Thompson and colleagues at the
University of California, Los Angeles scanned the brains of
23 sets of identical twins and the same number of fraternal
twins. The technology, which measures the amount of water
diffusing through white matter in the brain, indirectly
measures the integrity of myelin sheathing and therefore the
speed of nerve impulses.

By extensive analysis and cross-checking of the
identical twins (who share 100% of their genetic material)
and fraternal twins (who share 50%), the researchers
were able to determine that myelin integrity in parts of the
brain that are important for intelligence is determined by
genetics. This adds to previous research that found that the
volume of the brain's grey matter (which correlates with IQ)
is heritable, as is the amount of white matter, which provides
crucial connections between neurons.

The researchers point
determination of elements of intelligence isn't immutable. To
the contrary, it leaves the door open for future intelligence

enhancement therapies. ©

FOREVER YOUNG BIO ENHANCED NANO \ NEURO HUMOR

BRAIN-COMPUTER
INTERFACING:

From Prosthetic Limbs

to Telepathy Chips

BEN GOERTZEL

Direct brain-computer interfacing (BCD may sound fanciful, but it's already a reality — and in coming decades it
will almost surely advance dramatically. Neuroscientists are gradually understanding the electrochemical signals by
which our brains encode thoughts and feelings; statistical and AI tools are getting better and better at interpreting
complex data. The image at left shows one aspect of the state of the art. In an experiment by a group of researchers from

the University of Pittsburgh published in a 2008 issue of Nature, a monkey
used signals read directly from its motor cortex to control a multiple-jointed
gripper with numerous degrees of freedom — causing the gripper to deliver
food into its mouth.

forth; just plug some flash memory into your cortex and the knowledge is
right there. There seems no fundamental reason all this and more can't
occur in the next few decades.

The majority of today's BCI research involves the connection of
various electromechanical devices to the peripheral nervous system, as
we've seen with cochlear and retinal implants, and artificial arms and legs;
or else the readout of a small set of brain-wave-based control signals, as
in the Emotiv game controller (covered in h+ issue #1). Only a handful of
maverick researchers now explicitly pursue advanced forms of BCI that
seek to read more abstract thoughts from the brain. The main bottleneck
slowing this research is the lack of adequately accurate devices for
measuring and stimulating the brain. In this regard, one critical research
direction is the development of safe ways to implant more advanced BCI
devices inside the skull. It will probably continue to be easier to read the
brain state from within than without, though a breakthrough in "brain
imaging from the outside" can't be ruled out. Scientists are exploring
multiple radical brain imaging technologies, including devices involving
carbon nanotubes and other nanotech-based materials, which seem to
play more nicely with brain cells than conventional materials.

Today
BCI research
is largely
driven by
the desire
to help the
handicapped

via cochlear implants, prosthetic limbs and the like — but the scope of
potential applications is far broader than this laudable but limited market.
The entertainment industry is already getting into the picture; there are
currently at least two companies (Emotiv Systems and Neural Impulse
Activator) marketing BCI devices for video game control.

As BCI technology develops, we can expect it to increasingly serve
the function of cognitive enhancement. I'm reasonably good at mental
arithmetic and algebra, but I'd take an onboard calculator and computer
algebra program any day. A neural interface to Google, Wikipedia
and other online resources would be nice, too. And I wouldn't mind an
expanded short-term memory: no more repeating a phone number over
and over until I find a place to write it down! Learning a foreign language?
Forget the tedium of memorizing vocabulary, verb conjugations and so

SUMMER 2009

For now, many of our best insights into brain function have come
from studies placing electrodes deep inside the brain. Dr. Rodrigo Quiroga
and his colleagues have made great progress toward understanding how
memories of faces, objects, animals and scenes are stored in sparse
neural subnetworks in the region of the brain called the medial temporal
lobe. Understanding how the brain stores complex information is step
one toward figuring out how to read this information into a computer.

Would you become suspicious if your
husband or wife didn't want to do a
telepathy-chip mind-meld after coming
home late Friday night?

And in time, even more fascinating possibilities may be realized.
Consider the "telepathy chip" — a neural implant that allows the
wearer to project their thoughts or feelings to others, and receive
thoughts or feelings from others. There seems no in-principle reason
why this can't be done, but it raises a huge number of questions
philosophically, technically, psychologically and socially. It's not clear
what percentage of a person's thoughts and feelings would actually be
comprehensible to another person — in many cases, you might send
your thoughts to someone else only to find them interpreted as 90%
gobbledygook mixed up with concepts and images that are recognizable
to the receiver. It's also not too hard to envision some of the social
and economic pressures that might arise surrounding telepathy chips.
Would you become suspicious if your husband or wife didn't want to do
a telepathy-chip mind-meld after coming home late Friday night? Might
you become suspicious of a potential romantic partner who wouldn't
let you peek into his or her mind? What's she trying to hide? Teams of
individuals linked via telepathy chips might achieve far greater efficiency
at some sorts of work than any group of detached individuals with
similar skill could. Computer programming comes to mind, where the

resources ©

Nanoparticles to aid brain imaging
http://www.physorg.com/news78678220.html

Nanotube Scaffolds for Neural Implants
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17525/?a=f

Invariant Visual Representation by Single Neurons in the Brain
http://www.vis.caltech.edu/~rodri/papers/nature03687.pdf

Neural Impulse Actuator

http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=neural+impulse+actuator&u
m=l&ie=UTF-8&ei=nL3nSYX40p-0tgPhxl<3hAQ&sa=X&oi=video_result_
group&resnum=7&ct=title#

Emotiv Systems

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/neuro/epoc-neuroheadset

hardest part of the job is often understanding what other people were
thinking when they wrote the code that you have to deal with. Social
subgroups rejecting telepathy chips could become isolated, backwards
communities similar to the Amish today (who, it must be noted, don't
mind their backwardness and isolation at all).

Ultimately, telepathy chips and related BCI devices could
lead to the emergence of new forms of intelligence, u mindplexes"
composed of independent human minds, yet also possessing
a coherent self and consciousness at the higher level of the
telepathically-interlinked human group. AI systems could
potentially join these mindplexes, reading from telepathy
chips and projecting into the user's minds not just answers
to questions, but also original ideas conceived by the AIs that
they believe could benefit the humans. Humans who reject
telepathic interplay with AIs could be at a significant disadvantage both
socially and economically. Nearly any job requiring insight and creativity
would benefit from a stream of u push technology" input from a savvy

AI. And wouldn't your date with Jane tonight go better if your natural
charming personality were enhanced by a stream of witty anecdotes and
sensitive, empathic statements supplied by an AI who has studied Jane's
profile and history in the context of its comprehensive knowledge of
human relationships? Potentially all this could lead to the emergence of
a global brain spanning human and artificial intelligence.

BCI is early-stage now, and we don't know where it will lead
exactly, but the near-term possibilities are dramatically fascinating and
the longer-term ones truly profound. €>

Ben Goertzel is the CEO of AI companies Novamente and Biomind, a math Ph.D.,
writer, philosopher, musician, and all-around futurist maniac.

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

NANO NEURO HUMOR

SMART BIOLOGY

to the

RESCUE

Alex Lightman

As the Boomers begin to go gray and fragile, those with way
high expectations confront an uncomfortable fact — nobody
has done much about aging, throughout their lifetimes... and
they get angry.

How could this be?! Technology has carried us along on its broad
back, giving us computers, conveniences, Internet and media
wonders. But aches and pains foretell much bad news ahead.
\ We can do better, but to do it we'll have to reinvent biology.

Face it: young or old, we can't solve u the aging
problem" using the standard 20th Century research methods
of cell biology. Sure, they had some great success with some
other medical problems — nobody fears smallpox, polio and
other old school diseases. Diet and exercise help, too, (as
discussed in my last column.) But nobody has done much
directly about the mechanisms that erode our bodies.

Why? Because beyond our 20s, natural selection
doesn't help us much. Once we start reproducing, all the
genes that break us down get passed on to the next generation.
It's been that way throughout natural evolution. Aging arises
from a lack of natural selection in later adulthood.
So what's the smart biology dodge around this? Make selection
work for us by forcing it to produce longer-lived animals. And then
learn from what forced selection tells us. That's what the 21st Century
medicine man knows. We can already see him peeking around the
corner up ahead. He says: Your aging comes from multiple genetic
\ deficiencies, not a single biochemical problem.

Michael Rose at UCI saw all this coming 30 years
A ago. He started breeding longer and longer lived fruit flies
Hl (Drosophila) by having them not keep their eggs to make the
next generation until much later in adult life. Do that in
humans and you'll be trying to get babies out of 60 years
olds — not a promising route — though I guess the
Italians, with a 1.1 fertility rate (2.1 is replacement)
are trying.

Rose's years of painstaking Methuselah
fly stud-servicing produced a tracking miracle:
flies that live 4.5 times longer than ordinary flies.
Do that with humans for 10,000 years - 500

generations - and you'll start approaching Rose's results. But to get the
advantages today you'd have to start back before there were cities.

That's why smart biology uses "animals" — particularly insects,
that don't live long — to squeeze those 10,000 years down to a career-
lifetime of about 40 years. (Rose is in his 50s.)

What do the genetic inventories of these Methuselah flies show?
Multiple, overlapping genomic pathways. About 75% of the genes do the
same jobs in flies as they do in humans. We share these basic operating
systems with insects that we parted company from about a billion years
ago. (Yes, intelligent design fanatics, you are related to mosquitoes.
Suck it up. Stop bugging me.)

Genescient Corporation acquired the use of the Methuselah flies'
genomics and has developed their implications for three years. Knowing

You'll know 21st Century medicine
has arrived when you see
immortality pills featuring mixes
of designer supplements.

that these complex genomic pathways can enhance resistance to the
many disorders of aging, their crucial step is to find substances that can
enhance the action of those pathways. Designer supplements containing
nutrients made using detailed genomic information — a field called
nutrigenomics — are about to come to your
local supermarket, some of them using obscure
traditional medicines. This is the essence of a
21st Century approach to aging. Nothing like it
has existed before this year.

Noted hard science fiction author and
Genescient (which means 'smart genes')
cofounder Gregory Benford argues that there
seems no fundamental reason why we can't live
to 150 years or even longer ( u and you can have
sex up to 150 also"... I like that part). After
all, nature has done quite well on her own,
using pathways humans share and can now
understand. The 4,800-year-old bristlecone
pine, and koi fish over 200 years old, attest to
this, not to mention tortoises.

Nature took several billion years
developing these pathways; Genescient aims
to explore them rather like someone playing
SimEarth or Spore: by speeding up generational times. The medical

technology emerging now acts
on these basic pathways to
immediately affect all types of

and studying organs, and organizes diseases mostly by spotlighting
local disorders. Genomics can focus on entire organisms by looking at
the entire picture.

You'll know 21st Century medicine has arrived when you see
immortality pills featuring mixes of designer supplements. These will
regulate your own genes to improve their resistance to the many ways
things can go wrong. The plausible outcome of taking these pills will
be bodies that don't seem to age as fast and that can maintain vigor
long after the childbearing years, when we traditionally begin to show
wear and tear.

That's what happened with Michael Rose's Methuselah flies.
The Genescient labs track fly vigor by their mating frequency — they
count how often the flies get it on — and the numbers of eggs the
females lay. Those horny Methuselahs beat out the other
flies in the mating game. Basically, the more you want and
get sex, the longer you will live. Adult Friend Finder and
Be Naughty, you are free to quote me on this.

After the first wave of designer supplements, we'll see
customized nutrigenomic pills. Medicine will get tailored
to each personal genome. Targeting a person's own suite of
complex pathways, smart designer supplements and drugs
can propel the repair mechanisms and augmentations that
nature provided. This will benefit everyone, not just the
genomically fortunate.
The 21st Century has scarcely begun, and already it looks as
though many who welcomed it in will see it out. The first person to
live to 150 may be reading this right now. #

RESOURCES ©

http'/ww^genescient.com or 9 ans - Traditionally, medicine

focuses on disease by isolating

Alex Lightman is the author of the first book on 4G wireless, Brave New
Un wired World (Wiley) and founder of pioneering companies in 3-D and
Hollywood websites, wearables, and IPv6. He welcomes friending on
Facebook.

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

FOREVER YOUNG

BIO

ENHANCED

NANO

! NEURO

HUMOR

ROGER PEDERSON,

Won't You Please Come Home?

Moira A. Gunn, Ph.D.

About five years ago, a cadre of British scientists flew
into San Francisco for a British Trade Commission
event, and the smart gal who organized it asked
me if I would consider interviewing them. Our previous
interactions had served up such stellar guests as Lord David
Sainsbury, the British science minister, and Sir Richard
Sykes, the Rector (we would say "President") of Imperial
College London. I thought it wise to simply trust her
judgment, and I was rewarded.

She showed up with five illustrious biotech guests, one
right after another. They included such luminaries as Dame
Julia Polak, now emeritus professor of Tissue Engineering
and Regenerative Medicine at Imperial and one of Britain's
longest surviving heart-lung recipients, and Suzy Leather,
the head of the HFEA, the Human Fertilisation and
Embryology Authority. If you haven't heard of HFEA, it
u regulateCs] the storage of all eggs, sperm and embryos" in
the UK. It's interesting that the Brits control it all down to
the strictest detail, while here in the US, it's a genetic free-for-all: Somewhere over
half a million fertilized embryos are on ice and in private hands, while no one even
thinks to count what's laying around in sperm banks.

Still, it was the last guest through the door that was the shocker: He was an
American. In fact, he was from San Francisco. Roger Pederson was a stem cell
scientist at UCSF, and he had moved to the University of Cambridge for one very
simple reason: In 2001, President George W. Bush had put into place an Executive
Order limiting federal funding to the 22 existing human stem cell lines. To Roger, this
spelled disaster. He saw the handwriting on the laboratory wall and headed over to
England as soon as he could. While they heavily regulate the embryos and such, they
actually permit and fund stem cell research. What's this? American scientists leaving
the U.S.? With a chuckle, the Brits described it as a u brain gain."

The bottom line was that Roger was a scientist — one at the top of his field. He
had to work. He saw moving to Cambridge as both a great opportunity and the only
real solution.

I hadn't thought about him since that day... until today. At this writing, it's

SUMMER 2009

March 9th, 2009, and President Barack
Obama has just signed an Executive Order,
this one rescinding W's defiant edict. I say
"defiant" intentionally — twice, Congress
voted to overturn this Executive Order, and
twice, President Bush vetoed it. There was
simply no talking to him about it. He believed
what he believed, and that was all there was
to it.

But in the meantime, the sensibilities of
the country have shifted. Congress has taken
up the Zeitgeist of the American people.
Yes, some citizens will forever believe that
using very early stage embryos for research
— humans eggs fertilized outside the body
in a scientific lab — is morally wrong, but
the great swath of Americans do not. In

dream described by the late actor Christopher
Reeve, but for Roger Pederson, it's an
undeniable indicator. He's got to know that
a tsunami of drug applications are on their
way to the FDA. He can Google the news
and know that the House of Representatives
voted $3.5 billion for the National Institutes
of Health into the economic stimulus package,
and that the Senate upped it to $10 billion.
And now, President Obama has finally lifted
the blockading Executive Order. So Roger
Pederson has got to know that an avalanche of
science is being proposed — and he's got to be
thinking long and hard about his situation. The
Brits have been very generous to him. They
welcomed him with open arms. Can he cut and
run? He's got to have studies mid-stream. And

Do they believe so strongly that faced with a severe
injury, they would say, "No, I won't take this therapy"?

fact, they're beginning to understand that
DNA and genetics is hugely important. They
gulp down season after season of CSI. They
buy paternity kits for $29.99 at Walgreens.
Pregnant women get tested for all kinds of
genetic disorders, while women with breast
cancer can immediately discover whether the
drug Herceptin will work for them. Everyone
has begun to suspect that within their
lifetimes, their DNA will tell them more about
themselves than they ever imagined — their
past, their present and their future.

So, Roger Pederson, still a professor at
Cambridge, must know that right here in the
United States, it's a brand new day. Just weeks
after the inauguration, the FDA approved
the first-ever clinical trials enabling Geron
Corporation to inject a stem cell therapeutic
into newly-arriving patients with severe spinal
cord injuries. For us, it's the realization of a

students. And colleagues. And funders. Yeah,
just what do you do when the worm turns?

Roger is not the only one with a personal
dilemma. Think of the people who have always
been opposed to embryonic stem cell research.
Do they believe so strongly that faced with a
severe spinal cord injury, they would say, u No,
I won't take this therapy"? Or will they, like
most humans, seek whatever remedy they can
muster?

For others, it's a question of faith, and
different religions have begun to register their
positions. In December, the Vatican issued a
paper concerning the Dignity of the Person
(Dignitas Personae). In it, in vitro fertilization
is ruled out. That's right. U AII techniques of
... artificial fertilization ... which substitute
for the conjugal act are to be excluded." It
doesn't matter that it's a married couple using
their own eggs and sperm. If the fertilized

embryo is not created during the conjugal
act, it's unacceptable. The paper doesn't
answer the question of what to do about all
those humans who, indeed, have already been
created in the proverbial test tube, yet I can't
help but feel for Louise Brown and how she
herself might feel reading the Vatican paper.
Who would ever want to read something that
clearly states it is wrong for you to exist.

Without a doubt, these are times of
vertiginous change. We still have those
in opposition to stem cell research, who
believe fervently and have followed their
moral compass. And there are those who
are driven by a different moral imperative
to develop these technologies for the good of
humanity. Then there are many, many more
in the middle, who

spinal cord are sim p'y trvin g

to get by and are
worried about their
next paycheck, not
to mention the millions who have no health
insurance. Few of these people can believe
that stem cell research has anything to do
with them. But the truth is - they would be
wrong. The promise of genetic diagnostics
and stem cell therapies is that we will be able
to detect and fight disease and trauma, early,
effectively, and on a vastly cheaper basis than
ever before.

Everything tells me that we are at a
fantastic turning point in history. The promise,
the potential, the funding and the enormous,
ready and willing effort of all our scientists -
for once, it looks like it's all coming together.
So, Roger Pederson - please come home.
Consider it an u all hands" meeting. Thank
the Brits for their generosity, but frankly, we
need you, and I know you wouldn't want to
miss it. You see, the u gene genie" is out of
the bottle. O

Moira A. Gunn, Ph.D. hosts "BioTech Nation " on NPR Talk and NPR Live. She's the author of "Welcome to BioTech Nation: My Unexpected
Odyssey into the Land of Small Molecules, Lean Genes, and Big Ideas/ 7 cited by the Library Journal as one of the "Best Science Books of 2007."
She will be awarded an honorary doctorate in science in May, 2009 by Purdue University.

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

FOREVER YOUNG

BIO

ENHANCED

NANO

NEURO

HUMOR

ENHANCED:

Optogenetics

QUINN NORTON

Brain control has always proven tricky, particularly when it comes to the brain
trying to control itself. We have many indirect methods — drugs, meditation,
education, travel, etc. — but people have always wanted quick and reliable
control of their brain states. And what that actually means is that they want to change
an area of the brain. Switching the drives and mental states we need on and off would
be considerably less frustrating than the transitioning struggles nature has given us. And
so we are entering the era of a new set of technologies for direct neural control.

The best current technology combines psychosurgery
and implantation. Right now, hard-to-treat disorders can
get a difficult direct neural treatment called Deep Brain
Stimulation, or DBS. DBS is like a pacemaker for the brain.
An electrode is snaked down to the area associated with the
disorder being treated and left in place. After the surgery
has healed, the implant pulses current at a frequency that
either activates or quiets the area responsible for the
condition. Affecting cells further from the electrode means
passing more current through nearby cells. DBS is by far
the most precise clinical procedure for controlling areas of
the brain, but it's still disappointingly non-specific. Since

DBS involves brain surgery, it's generally a treatment
of last resort, but it's shown good results for previously
untreatable cases of Parkinson's, chronic pain, and
depression. Electrode implantation is an extreme measure,
not likely to be widely used.

Dr. Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University can go one
better. He's developed a technique called optogenetics
that combines genetic engineering, lasers, neurology and
surgery to create a direct control mechanism. Optogenetics
uses a brain cell switch with two genetic parts. The first is
a gene taken from an algae that activates the cell in the
presence of blue light in order to turn towards the light

SUMMER 2009

f iber Optic
Cahle

Channelihodopsin- 2 {algae derived)
activates, ranging cell to fire

hi.- c:*u

Blue Light {-473 nm)

OFF

Fiber Optic
Cable

HaloThodDpsin (archaeon derived}
activates, releasing chloride ions

m?0

and photosynthesis. In a neuron, that
activation fires the cell. The second
is from an archaeon, a salt-based
extremophile, which responds to yellow
light by pumping chloride ions. In a brain
cell, that means not firing at all.

To get the genes in place,
Deisseroth's team opens up the skull
and uses a pipette to apply a non-
reproducing adenovirus to the desired
brain area. The virus is genetically
configured to inject both genes into a
single cell type. The single cell will take
both genes. After the u light switch"
genes are in place, those brain cells are
now light sensitive and a 50 micrometer
fiber optic cable is fed to the area. In

this way, they can target very specific deep brain structures, areas believes optogenetics might be a way of reducing the side effects
currently too deep and fragile for most psychosurgery. Once the of VNS by targeting the treatments, rather than just shocking the
researcher attaches the other end of the cable to a laser, he or she neck region.

50
urn

Chloride ions
cause cells to
cease tiling

Yellow light [-593 nm)

Brain Celt

has absolute and flawless control over that group of neurons: blue
light on, yellow light off.

All this points to easier and more effective neural control.
We're still far from knowing which cells do what, and further from

Dr. Deisseroth is a psychiatrist as well as bioengineer, and he orchestrating treatments and enhancements for specific conditions,
envisions using optogenetics in place of DBS's not-so-deep cousin, But for the first time we can map and build useful handles on the
Vagus Nerve Stimulation. Much like DBS, VNS uses an electrode very things that make us ourselves. •
to treat depression and epilepsy but targets where the vagus nerve
passes through the neck rather than deep in the brain. It can still
cause problems in many patients — sleep apnea, throat pain,

Quinn Norton covers science, technology, law and whatever else
gets her attention. She lives in Washington D.C. and is most easily

coughing, and voice changes are the main complaints. Deisseroth reachable at quinn@quinnnorton.com

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

ex a,

The Fertility Institutes Back Away From Making History

MICHAEL ANISSIMOV

You may not know it, but gender selection based on
pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has been
available to paying couples since at least 2001. One
of the world leaders in providing this service is the Fertility
Institutes, with branches in Los Angeles, New York, and
Guadalajara in Mexico. According to their website, they've
had over 3,800 cases of gender selection with a 100% success
rate. Besides offering gender selection, they screen embryos
for genetic defects such as breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, and
over 70 other diseases. The Institutes are directed by Dr.

Jeff Steinberg, a pioneer of IVF (in vitro fertilization) in the

1970s, and a successful scientist-businessman today.

ENTS WILLING
JSE PGD TO
EEN FOR:

In early February, the Fertility Institutes created enormous
controversy by announcing that they planned to offer PGD
services allowing for the selection of eye and hair color
for children. Steinberg was quoted by the BBC as saying, VX I
would not say this is a dangerous road. It's an uncharted road."
As a scientist experienced in PGD/IVF techniques, Steinberg
was aware that the technology to select physical traits in
humans has been available for years, but no one would touch
it. u It 7 s time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand/ 7
Steinberg said. Transhumanists and other fans of procreative
freedom were excited by the news.

The backlash was widespread. Quoted in the New York
Daily News on February 23, the Pope himself condemned the
"obsessive search for the perfect child/ 7 The pontiff complained,
U A new mentality is creeping in that tends to justify a different
consideration of life and personal dignity. 77 The Roman Catholic
Church objects to all applications of PGD because they invariably
involve the destruction of blastocysts.

On his blog Secondhand Smoke, conservative bioethicist
Wesley J. Smith, who has co-authored four books with Ralph
Nader, wrote, u We are constantly told that the right of a woman
to reproduce is absolute, including getting pregnant, aborting
if the pregnancy is ever unwanted, and now, genetically
engineering progeny to order. But no Vight 7 is absolute. The
time has long since passed to put some regulatory controls over
the wild, wild west of IVF. 77

On February 28, Steinberg continued to defend his
approach by telling the Sunday Telegraph, U I understand the
trepidation and concerns, but we cannot escape the fact that
science is moving forward. If I have to get smacked around by
people who think it is inappropriate, then I 7 m willing to live with
that. 77

Then, all of a sudden, on March 2, Steinberg capitulated to
widespread criticism. A press release on the Fertility Institutes
web site read, u In response to feedback received related to our
plans to introduce preimplantation genetic prediction of eye
pigmentation, an internal, self regulatory decision has been
made to proceed no further with this project. 77 Gattaca was
averted.

The public debate about selecting traits like eye and hair
color for newborns is a continuation of a debate that has gone

75°/

55°/

58°/c

53%

50%

10%

15%

55%

etic

testing should never be offered"

on for at least two decades - the debate about PGD-based
gender selection, a technique that is easier than trait selection
and has already been done thousands of times. Back in 1990,
pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of any type was banned in
Germany by the Embryo Protection Act. In 2003, the U K banned
using PGD for gender selection, following a year-long public
consultation in which about 80% of those polled were against
the procedure. India and China have banned the procedure,
despite the widespread practice of infanticide when babies of
an undesired gender, usually female, are born to disappointed
parents. Gender selection still occurs, albeit violently.

More recently, a January 2009 study by researchers at
NYU Langone Medical Center found that an overwhelming
75% of parents would be in favor of trait selection using PGD
- as long as that trait is the absence of mental retardation. A
further 54% would screen their embryos for deafness, 56%
for blindness, 52% for a propensity to heart disease, and 51%
for a propensity to cancer. Only 10% would be willing to select
embryos for better athletic ability, and 12.6% would select
for greater intelligence. 52.2% of respondents said that there
were no conditions for which genetic testing should never be
offered, indicating widespread support for PGD - as long as it's
for averting disease and not engineering human enhancement.

Trait selection using PGD is too new - and unproven - for
there to be regulatory laws in most developed countries. But
many fighters in the battle for or against PGD for trait selection
and genetic disease screening believe that today is the decision
point that will set the precedent for future regulation (or lack
thereof) in the area. On May 21, 2008, the US Congress passed
the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act. According
to the Statement of Administration Policy associated with the
Act, it u prohibitEs] group health plans and health insurers from
denying coverage to a healthy individual or charging that person
higher premiums based solely on a genetic predisposition to
developing a disease in the future. The legislation also would
bar employers from using individuals 7 genetic information when
making hiring, firing, job placement, or promotion decisions.
The Administration appreciates that the House bill clarifies that
the bill's protections cover unborn children/ 7

In the oft-cited movie Gattaca, a non-genetically-selected
man with a heart problem in a trait-selected world must hide

his status through the course of his ambition to become an astronaut.
Theoretically, the 2008 law would make this type of discrimination illegal,
at least in the United States. But what about Gattaca? The film was invoked
so frequently in negative responses to the Fertility Institutes 7 announcement
that it is hard to find a comments thread on the topic that doesn't mention
it. In his 2004 book Citizen Cyborg, Dr. James Hughes, a transhumanist
bioethicistand director of the Institute for Ethicsand Emerging Technologies,
pointed out a few quibbles with the movie:

Astronaut-training programs are entirely justified in attempting
to screen out people with heart problems for safety reasons;

In the United States, people are already discriminated against
by insurance companies on the basis of their propensities to
disease despite the fact that genetic enhancement is
not yet available;

Rather than banning genetic testing or genetic enhancement,
society needs genetic information privacy laws that allow
justified forms of genetic testing and data aggregation, but
forbid those that are judged to result in genetic discrimination
(such as the previously mentioned U.S. Genetic Information
Nondiscrimination Act). Citizens should then be able to make a
complaint to the appropriate authority if they believe they have
been discriminated against because of their genotype.

Those on the other side of the divide are numerous. At a 2008 meeting
of the American Society of Human Genetics, William Kearns, a leading
medical geneticist, when prompted about trait selection, said x Tm totally
against this. My goal is to screen embryos to help couples have healthy
babies free of genetic diseases. Traits are not diseases/ 7 Mark Hughes, the

head of the Genesis Genetics Institute in Detroit, has called the practice
"ridiculous and irresponsible". More bluntly, George Annas, a bioethicist
with Boston University, has said "modern genetics is eugenics", while
on a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

The falling costs of gene sequencing is enabling PGD trait selection
and lowering the barrier to entry. In the last few years, the cost of
sequencing a base pair has fallen so low that even the optimists have
been surprised. The first human genome that was sequenced, by the
federally financed Human Genome Project in 2003, cost a few hundred
million dollars. In 2007, sequencing James Watson's genome cost about
$2 million. In March 2008, Applied Biosystems, based in California,
sequenced a genome in two weeks for $50,000. In October 2008,
Complete Genomics, another California-based company and a veritable
who's who of genomics expertise, announced that it would be offering
$5,000 genomes in mid-2009, with the goal of sequencing 1,000
genomes by the end of the year. Some observers, such as George Church,
a professor of genetics and director of the center for computational
genetics at Harvard Medical School, predict a $1,000 genome by the
end of this year.

The requisite technologies for trait selection are on the way, but
the battle lines have not yet been entirely drawn. Prompted by a Wall
Street Journal article on the Fertility Institutes and trait selection,
Kathryn Hinsch of the Women's Bioethics Project argued that thinking
about issue carefully is important, and refrained from taking a hard
stance on either side. She said that trait selection should be considered
because, u l) It's a hive of ethical issues, 2) The technology isn't here
yet, 3) We all have a stake in the issue, and 4) Questions raised go
beyond designer babies." According to Hinsch, the key questions that
need to be addressed are: "Should we ban it? Should we regulate the
technology to allow only certain applications? Should we promote the
widespread use of this technology?"

The advocates of trait selection using PGD, at least in the Western
world, appear to be small in number. But as the NYU Langone Medical
Center survey showed, there are at least a few. On his blog Sentient
Developments, George Dvorsky, a prominent transhumanist bioethicist,
pointed out that "some demand is still demand". Commenting on the
survey, Dvorsky said, "An anti-enhancement bias is most certainly
embedded in our society. It's very likely that many of the respondents
were answering the survey in accordance to their social conditioning
and what they thought was expected of them from an 'ethical 7
perspective/ 7 Supporting the idea of trait selection, Dvorsky wrote,
"What we 7 re talking about here is endowing our children with all the

own minds and bodies than we enjoy today. 77

In a March 9, 2009 WIRED online interview, James Hughes
registered support for trait selection, and also railed against the
"designer baby 77 terminology altogether. Responding to the future of
trait selection, he said, "It 7 s inevitable, in the broad context of freedom
and choice. And the term 'designer babies 7 is an insult to parents,
because it basically says parents don't have their kids 7 best interests at
heart. 77 He said, "If I 7 ve got a dozen embryos I could implant, and the
ones I want to implant are the green-eyed ones, or the blond-haired
ones, that's an extension of choices we think are perfectly acceptable
— and restricting them a violation of our procreative autonomy. 77

James Hughes said, "the term 'designer
babies' is an insult to parents, because
it basically says parents don't have
their kids' best interests at heart.

PGD and other reproductive
technologies are commonly
rejected as "unnatural 77 .
The transhumanists and
technoprogressive response
is summarized well in the
Transhumanist FAQ, which says,
"In many particular cases, of

tools we can give them so that they may live an enriched, open-ended
and fulfilling life. By denying them these benefits we are closing doors
and potentially reducing the quality of their lives. 77

Another advocate of cautious trait selection is Ramez Naam,
author of the 2005 book More Than Human. In a chapter on genetic
engineering, he writes, "A regulatory regime consistent with family
choice would focus on safety, education, and equality rather than
prohibition 77 . Looking past the immediate future, Naam also writes,
"Ultimately, whatever choices we make for our children will be subject
to change, at their choice, when they reach adulthood. In the coming
years, pharmaceuticals, adult gene therapy, and the integration of
computers into the brain will give people far more control over their

course, there are sound practical reasons for relying on "natural 77
processes. The point is that we cannot decide whether something
is good or bad simply by asking whether it is natural or not. Some
natural things are bad, such as starvation, polio, and being eaten alive
by intestinal parasites. Some artificial things are bad, such as DDT-
poisoning, car accidents, and nuclear war. 77

The legal and ethical future of trait selection based on PGD is
still unknown. What is known is that parents will always want the best
for their children. When push comes to shove, they will probably take
advantage of whatever technologies are available that will give them
the best lives possible. ®

Michael Anissimov is a writer and futurist in San Francisco. He writes a blog,
Accelerating Future, on artificial intelligence, transhumanism, extinction risk,
and other areas.

RESOURCES ©

Fertility Institutes
http://www.gender-selection.com

Sentient Developments
http://www.sentientdevelopments.com

ANDY MIAH, Sports Doping,
and the Enhancement Enlightenment

KRISTI SCOTT

Andy Miah is the Renaissance man of the enhancement
enlightenment. While best known for defending "doping"
(performance enhancement) in sports, as a professor in
Ethics and Emerging Technologies at the University of the West
of Scotland, his work draws from law, philosophy, art, cultural
studies, sociology, bioethics, human enhancement, social media,
life-extension, ethical culture, climate change, synthetic biology, and
artificial life. As if that isn't enough, Miah says he's now looking at
architecture and the future, extraterrestrial ethics, and ideas about
biocultural capital. (And just for fun, he's also a graphic designer and
film connoisseur.)

Miah has been writing and talking in various public forums
about enhancement, sports enhancement, and the future for almost
ten years. In that time, he has become an influential voice in these
areas, along with all things vv bio." Miah has published over 100 solo-
authored academic articles on sports enhancements and other topics.
He has published two books, including Genetically M odi ft ed Athletes
(Routledge, 2004), regarding biomedical ethics, gene doping and
sport. And while Miah's writing on sports enhancement has made
him fairly controversial, he refuses to be pigeonholed. He knows that
being labeled creates boundaries, and he has worked to have his voice
heard in such influential places as the Olympics committees.

With his spiky jet-black hair, self-confident charisma, and his
understated but hip sartorial style, Miah gives the impression of an
intellectual rock star. Given his eclecticism, it shouldn't be surprising
that our conversation skips across a wide range of topics.

"Genetically modified athletes will simply be those people who gave value to enhancements that are most suitable
for athletic performances/ 7

Our conversation turned to controversial headliner and amputee sprinter, Oscar Pistorius. Miah said that he
wanted to see Pistorius be allowed to compete, if he would have qualified, amidst the fantastic architecture of
the Beijing stadium, saying that, "there's so much conceptual overlap when thinking about the future" and seeing
these two images together.

It may surprise you to know that Miah has written
papersforthe British Olympic Association, the International
Olympic Committee, the International Olympic Academy,
and the Brazilian Olympic Committee. But he doesn't
seem to expect to win his point with the Olympic
authorities. u For the anti-doping authorities, they have
little option but to press on full steam. It's getting a bit
out of control in my view, how much they will do for so-
called clean sport/ 7

I asked Miah about the notion of having two separate
venues — one for enhanced athletes and another for clean
(au natural, if you will) athletes, He's
somewhat skeptical. u The problem
is that, in this scenario, you'd still
have the enhanced trying to get
into the clean.... I think people like
Pistorius will allow us to confront
some important issues." Reflecting
on it a bit, Miah conceded, vx It all
depends on whether the enhanced
could achieve adequate prominence
to rival the clean. It's ultimately
about trying to build symbolic value
around a new series of competitions.
I actually think the way it'll go is that we end up with
just the enhanced.... I argue that sports authorities are
obliged to invest into creating safer forms of enhancement
for athletes to use."

We seem to be witnessing the wisdom of Miah's way
when we look at the borderline hysteria and the apparent

This

Human Futures:
Art in an Age of
Uncertainty
Andy Miah, Editor

FACT (Foundation for Art
and Creative Technology),
Liverpool University Press
December 11, 2008

Book's
For You

The first thing that hits you when you open up Human
Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty are the visuals
— they are stunning. And then you look at the content
and are amazed. And then you realize it's an academic
book, and you are perplexed. And let me tell you a little
something, it was put together in around six months or
so. Now look again.

Human Futures is a compilation of creative essays
from leading scientists, designer artifacts, and artistic
works. Some of the best and the brightest weigh in on
topics that address U NBIC (nano-, bio-, info-, cogno-)
sciences, ethics and aesthetics of human enhancement,
the future of biological migration and transgressions,
the emergence of systems and synthetic biology,
ecosystem responsibility, global catastrophic risk, and
outer space/ 7 And if one of these topics doesn't rock
your world, and you're an h+ reader, I'm stunned.

Academics will use this book as a point of
reference, but it's also a damn good read (and it
will look good on your coffee table.) With titles like:
u Will Human Enhancement Make us Better? Ethical
reflections on the enhancement of human capacities by
means of biomedical technologies" by Ruud ter Meulen,
"Embracing the Unknown Future: In Defense of New
Technology" by Russell Blackford, and "Flesh to Data/
Subject to Data: Examining Processes of Translation"
by Marilene Oliver, this book's for you!

WHERETO BUY

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Futures-Art-Age-Uncertainty/
dp/1846311810

The acceptance of personal enhancement "has
been far from smooth... but equally the desire
to enhance has become more apparent."

inability to stop steroid and other performance enhancement in
major league baseball in the U.S. The societal consensus is that we
do not want our athletes to do steroids or human growth hormone
or any other drugs that enhance their athletic performance. The
acceptance of human enhancements in sports will be a long
time coming. In the meantime, we're likely to witness another
unwinnable u war" attempting to stop people from doing what
they are inevitably, eventually going to do. As Miah observed,
the acceptance of personal enhancement u has been far from
smooth... but equally the desire to enhance has become more
apparent, as evidenced by the number of ways in which we seek
to alter our bodies and minds/ 7

As our conversations moved from sports and into the more
general subject of human enhancement, I discovered that Mian's
enthusiasms are pretty much limitless and his knowledge is
encyclopedic. Mention that you're looking for an image of an
enhanced eye, Mian's got one. Want a woman that could be a
poster girl for the beauty of enhancement, with prosthetic legs and
a body and face you wouldn't believe? Miah has the information
and images. u We are very keen on exploring dimensions of our
identity though biological modifications. We've done this in the
past through tattoo, piercing, scarification even. There's a long
list and each of these mechanisms has been about marking oneself
out culturally and socially."

Remember that story about the selective memory deletion in
mice a few months back? (If not, Google it. Crazy cool.) Ask Miah
about it and he'll refer you to his article on Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind. (Do you remember that movie? Or was it

selectively deleted?) His article, like that film, really brings home
the situation, and the nuances of memory deletion. It's a good
read, not just a journal article.

"...the moral narrative of Eternal Sunshine is ambiguous in many
respects, since it confronts our uncertainty about how best to
overcome difficulties in life.... After watching Eternal Sunshine,
while one is left feeling that the best solution to dealing with
human suffering already resides within our learned capacities,
there is also a sense in which leaving this merely for time to
heal is inadequate and that we are quite right for seeking more
effective, efficient and gentle means. The difficulty, though, is
that Eternal Sunshine portrays memory deletion as anything but
gentle."

Lastly, as Malcom Gladwell would say, Miah is a Connector
u with a special gift for bringing the world together." Aside from
his intellectual eclecticism, making connections between art and
science and a broad mix of disciplines, he knows a lot of people:
science fiction writers, philosophers, designers, artists, scientists,
academics, people from sports and architecture. Andy Miah sees
the value in bringing people together in a collaborative manner
and having them work on ideas about the future. He believes that
the artist and the scientist, working together, can create a truly
beneficial relationship, envisioning a future that is enhanced, in
the deepest and best sense of the word. 6

Kristi Scott has a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, interns with the Institute for
Ethics & Emerging Technologies, is a freelance writer, and mother of three.

RESOURCES©

Andy Miah Oscar Pistorius Guardian New Science Writing

www.andymiah.net http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/

mar/01/simon-singh-chris-french-pz-myers-andy-
miah-new-science-writing

DARNING GENES:

BIOLOGY FOR THE HOMEBODY

Meredith Patterson interview

TYSON ANDERSON

he age of the DIYbiologist has begun. With the price of equipment falling and the
open source ideology flourishing, it was perhaps inevitable that we would see the rise
of this new DIY community. And while it may conjure pictures of citizens with scalpels
in one hand and a trowel in the other, DIYbiology is, in fact, an
exciting and potentially productive new field.

Primarily interested in the
currently fashionable trend
of synthetic biology — the
creation of novel organisms
using genetics and other
techniques — they meet
in groups, in cities, and
unite online. One popular
such location is DIYbio.
org, created by Mackenzie
Cowell and Jason Bobe.
Meredith Patterson, the
doyenne d'DIYbio, recently
caught AP's eye with her
pet project — a strain of
the bacteria responsible
for yogurt that secretes
miraculin as a sweetener.
While group discourse focuses on genetics and synthetic biology,
there are other hot topics, like creating lab equipment using common
household items or building a thermocycler for $25. There are intense
debates about bioethics, and projects like the global bioweather map
— a map that charts the flow, spread, and presence of various bacteria
around the world.

As the diversity of topics suggests, this is a large community.
Along with specialists in biological fields, you'll find educated amateurs
with an eye toward starting their own home labs. From academic to
soldier to artist, from middle schoolers to retirees, the DIYbio field
represents a cross-section of humanity and their convergence makes
for varied and interesting discussions.

And while one might envision dozens of isolated home biologists
homebrewing genes in their basements and garages, there is a social
aspect to this movement that goes beyond the online. Some people

who lack the space to store large amounts of equipment have formed
co-op labs where they work together. Meetings, arranged over the net,
generally happen at people's homes and have a party vibe. A map of
labs on the hackerspaces website shows the highest concentration of
interest on the Eastern coast of the U.S. But participants can be found
all over the globe, including Asia, Africa, and South America.

Why has this field suddenly exploded? The answer goes far
beyond falling costs and the rise of the garage tinkerer, although
these are factors. One big factor seems to be a desire to solve some of
today's major problems. Discussions seem to frequently drift towards
two particular topics: creating fuel-generating microbes and finding
remedies for disease. Indeed, the DIYbio community owes much of
its increase in size to do-gooders, concerned citizens who see DIYbio
as a method of confronting problems in a novel way. And while this is
heartening, many members simply want to pursue science for the love
of it. They're DIY simply because they wish to conduct research into
relatively unprofitable fields.

In much the same way that homebrew computer science built the
world we live in today, garage biology can affect the future we make
for ourselves. For example, the bioweather map could greatly augment
the way we understand epidemiology and the environment on a micro
scale. When we open science up to the public, we pretty much always
get useful results.

Of course, there are bound to be some ethical concerns about,
and within, a community tinkering with biology. The ethics of genetic
research is certainly not lost on the practitioners. Encroaching
legislation threatens to stifle their growth via tight regulation or
outright restriction. The DIYbiologists are trying to come up with fair
and workable solutions.

To get a better perspective on the DIYbio phenomenon and its
issues, h+ talked to Meredith Patterson, a Computer Science doctorate,
who is trying to solve issues with food contamination with bacterial
warning systems.

SUMMER 2009

the bioweather map could augment the
way we understand epidemiology on a
micro scale. When we open science up to

h+: How did you get involved with the public, we... always get useful results.

synthetic biology and DIYbio?

MEREDITH PATTERSON: Well, this goes back to about 2003. I
was just starting my PhD in computer science at the University of
Iowa, and I didn't know yet whether I was going to have a research
assistantship or a teaching assistantship, so I was looking for a part-
time job, and ended up taking an internship in the Bioinformatics
department at Integrated DNA Technologies. My boss there was
a guy named Andy Peek, who just recently became director of
bioinformatics and biostatistics at Roche. He's a really hands-on kind
of guy and remembers the days when everything in a wet lab was
done with cobbled-together equipment. So we'd talk about stuff like
how to do PCR without a thermocycler, or how to isolate DNA using
only common household items, like Mac's U DNA shot" instructable.

Fast forward to 2005. 1 was working on SciTools, which is IDT's
web-based primer design toolkit, and I got accepted to give a talk
on it at CodeCon (a software display conference). As an intro to the
talk, I isolated chickpea DNA using non-iodized salt, shampoo, meat
tenderizer, and a salad-spinner for a centrifuge, and that really blew
people away. So that was the point when I started spending my free
time reading old papers and thinking more about how to do more
advanced genetics research at home.

Fast forward again to last summer, when Len (Sassaman,
Patterson's husband) and I were in Houston for my sister's wedding
and were hanging out at the home of some geek friends of mine. I'd
had the idea for GFP yogurt several years before, and we were talking
about that, and the conversation progressed to what other kinds of
things you could make yogurt bacteria produce. Len hit on vitamin C,
and we all went u Whoa, we could cure scurvy with yogurt."

When we got back to San Francisco, that was when I went full-
bore ahead on building out my lab. I found the DIYbio list a couple of
weeks later, and the rest is history.

h+: You also talked about probiotics, yes?

MP: Yup. After all, lactobacilli are an important symbiote in the
human gut. That's why doctors recommend you load up on yogurt
after a course of antibiotics, to restore the normal balance of your
gut flora. This is just taking the notion of probiotics to a whole new
level. :)

h+: There has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of
people doing this sort of research at home. Do you think this is
over-exaggerated?

MP: I really do. The chances of someone accidentally creating a
dangerous organism and the chances of it surviving in the environment
outside a laboratory are vanishingly low.

Rudy Rucker has a great quote on that, U I have a mental image
of germ-size MIT nerds putting on gangsta clothes and venturing into
alleys to try some rough stuff. And then they meet up with the homies
who've been keeping it real for a billion years or so." The bare
facts of it are that there's nothing random about synthetic biology
research. When we design a transgenic
organism, we're deliberately adding
one specific piece of new functionality,
maybe a small pathway that leads to
a new piece of functionality — and
the organism has to expend energy on
producing the new proteins that those
new genes code for. Because of this,
the synthetic organism is necessarily
less competitive than its wild-type
relatives who are much better
suited for the niche they already
occupy in the environment.

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

So any accidental release is fated to die out within a few generations,
because it's just not competitive enough.

h+: Don't you think people may be taking some ethical liberties when
they try doing this at home because of the lack of transparency?

MP: Do you mean because there aren't reporting requirements to the
NIH or the FDA?

h+: Not just the lack of government oversight, but the fact that
someone may be engaging in, forgive the dramatization, Mengele-
type experiments and no one would know.

MP: One thing I've noticed about the DIYbio list in particular is that
the open-source approach leads to more transparency. I come from an
academic background in CS and linguistics, and something that's always
frustrated me about academia is the fixation on keeping research secret
from other research groups because people are afraid of getting scooped.
Here, no one cares about getting scooped — the focus is on learning,
and if someone else solves a problem first, then that's great, because
that means the problem has been solved. Egos don't get in the way. We
also have people documenting their research in public list e-mails and on
blogs, like what JJ is doing with his "Homebrew Bioscience Research"
blog, where he chronicles his experiments with moss.

It's interesting you mention that. I recently read an article about a
town in Brazil that has an unusually high population of twins — and there's
evidence that it was this town that Mengele fled to after WW2. So I think
the question of whether people will engage in unethical experimentation
sort of answers itself, without getting into DIYbio at all. As a community
I think it's our responsibility to encourage ethical experimentation and to
reinforce that on a social level — i.e., taking a stand against work that we
think is unethical, and taking a good hard look at our own work to make
sure that we're doing the right thing. I've gotten into some interesting
discussions on my own blog about the ethical issues involved with transgenic
symbiotes that complete the vitamin C synthesis pathway in humans...
whether it would be ethical to release them on a global scale or not. On
the one hand, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide suffer from
scurvy, and I want to help solve that problem and reduce human suffering.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people who are strongly opposed to
GMOs for a variety of reasons and are angry at the notion of an endemic
GMO, even one that prevents a very serious disease. And I do think that
their rights have to be respected. So it's a very difficult tightrope to walk,
and the questions about what is ethical and what isn't are really tough.

SUMMER 2009

They don't have simple answers. So I think my responsibility as an ethical
researcher is to engage with these questions as they come up, and try to
find solutions that reduce human suffering but still respect people's rights.
h+: In a recent interview with Monitor 360 you compared
DIYbiology with birdwatching. Don't you feel that there is a league
of difference between the two?

MP: Well, I'm a generalist at heart, even if I'm working in a very specific
area. To be honest, most of the cool things I've done scientifically have
come from cross-pollinating a couple of different research areas. So I
make that point about birdwatching and cataloging trees to remind
people that biology is really, really big, and it's worthwhile for experts
in small subfields to keep abreast of what's going on in other areas of the
field, because our expertise can help other people and their expertise can
help us. Between synthetic biology and birdwatching, absolutely. On the
other hand, both DIY synthetic biology and birdwatching are biological
endeavours, and a term like "DIYbiology" is broad enough to encompass
both. Western culture has a long and exciting tradition of talented
amateurs contributing to the progress of science, and I hope people
remember that we're following in the steps of people like John James
Audubon (who discovered and cataloged hundreds if not thousands of bird
and mammalian species, expanding our understanding of North American
biodiversity) as well as Edward Jenner, Jonas Salk, James
Watson, Francis Crick, Kary Mullis and so on. Jenner
came up with the notion
of using cowpox as a
vaccine for smallpox
by observing that
people who worked
with cattle and got cowpox didn't contract
smallpox, and developed his vaccine from
that — and he was an amateur just like we
are. He used his observations of the larger
environment to guide his research, and
that's a really important facet of science —
recognizing what's going on in the world
and using our observations to further
understanding. €>

- 200

Here Come the

Neurobots

Brain Bots are Developing Personalities

- and a Whole Lot More

STEVE KOTLER

Can we build a brain from the ground up, one neuron (or
so) at a time? That's the goal of neurobotics, a science
that sits at the convergence of robotics, artificial
intelligence, computer science, neuroscience, cognitive
psychology, physiology, mathematics and several different
engineering disciplines. Computationally demanding and
requiring a long view and a macroscopic perspective (qualities
not often found in our world of impatient specialization),
the field is so fundamentally challenging that there are only
around five labs pursuing it worldwide.

Neurobotics is an outgrowth of a growing realization that,
when it comes to understanding the brain, neither computer
simulations nor top-down robotic models are getting anywhere
close. As Dartmouth neuroscientist and Director of the Brain
Engineering Lab Richard Granger puts it, "The history of
top-down-only approaches is spectacular failure. We learned
a ton, but mainly we learned these approaches don't work/ 7

Gerald Edelman, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist
and Chairman of Neurobiology at Scripps Research Institute,
first described the neurobotics approach back in 1978.
F In his "Theory of Neuronal Group Selection/ 7 Edelman
essentially argued that any individual's nervous system
employs a selection system similar to natural selection,
though operating with a different mechanism. "It's obvious
that the brain is a huge population of individual neurons/ 7
says UC Irvine neuroscientist Jeff Krichmar. "Neuronal
Group Selection meant we could apply population models to
neuroscience, we could examine things at a systems 7 level. 77
This systems approach became the architectural blueprint for
moving neurobotics forward.

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

The Edge of Real Brain Complexity

The robots in Jeff Krichmar's lab don't look like much. CARL-1, his
latest model, is a squat, white trash can contraption with a couple of
shopping cart wheels bolted to its side, a video camera wired to the lid,
and a couple of bunny ears taped on for good measure. But open up that
lid and you'll find something remarkable — the beginnings of a truly
biological nervous system. CARL-1 has thousands of neurons and millions
of synapses that, he says, u are just about the edge of the amount of size
and complexity found in real brains/ 7 Not surprisingly, robots built this
way — using the same operating principles as our nervous system — are
called neurobots.

Krichmar emphasizes that these artificial nervous systems are
based upon neurobiological principles rather than computer models of
how intelligence works. The first of those principles, as he describes
it, is: u The brain is embodied in the body and the body is embedded in
the environment — so we build brains and then we put these brains in
bodies and then we let these bodies loose in an environment to see what
happens/ 7 This has become something of a foundational principle — and
the great and complex challenge — of neurobotics.

When you embed a brain in a body, you get behavior not often
found in other robots. Brain bots don 7 t work like Aibo. You can buy a
thousand different Aibos and they all behave the same. But brain bots,
like real brains, learn through trial and error, and that changes things.
u Put a couple of my robots inside a maze, 77 says Krichmar, u let them run
it a few times, and what each of those robots learns will be different.
Those differences are magnified into behavior pretty quickly. 77 When
psychologists define personality, it's along the lines of "idiosyncratic
behavior that's predictive of future behavior. 77 What Krichmar is saying
is that his brain bots are developing personalities — and they're doing it
pretty quickly.

Krichmar's bots develop personalities because, instead of pre-
programming behaviors, these robots have neuro-modulatory systems
or value judgment systems — move towards something good, move
away from something bad — that are modeled around the human's
dopaminergic system (for wanting or reward-based behaviors) and the
noradrenergic system (for vigilance and surprise). When something
salient occurs — in CARL-l's case that's usually bumping into a sensor in
a maze — a signal is sent to its brain telling the bot to react to the event
and remember the context for later. This is conditional learning and it
mimics what occurs in real brains. It also allows Krichmar to examine
one of the great puzzles in systems neuroscience — how do the brain's
neurons work together?

SUMMER 2009

u We're pretty sure you need a certain brain size for the level of
complexity we see in biological organisms," he says, u but we don't
have the tools to make a network that big behave in any stable way. The
biological brain is remarkably stable. We can alter it with drugs, we can
put it into all sorts of varied environments, pretty much it still knows how
to function. Our robots are still brittle by comparison."

Besides personality, another thing these robots develop are types
of episodic and categorical memory not found in other computers. After
running early brain bots Darwin X and Darwin XI through a few mazes,
Edelman, working alongside Krichmar and a researcher named Jason
Fleischer, found they'd naturally developed place cells — meaning they
didn't program them in. These are cells in the Hippocampus that fire
whenever an animal passes through a specific location, essentially linking
place with time. More than that, when Edelman examined his bots'
brains, he found these place cells would not only fire based on where the
robot had been, but also on where it was planning to go, "which," says
Krichmar, u is exactly what you would see in the brain of a rat and nothing
anyone's seen in a robot before."

The Biggest Dragon: Higher Cortical
Functions

Meanwhile, Richard Granger is using brain bots to hunt down yet another
grail: where language originates in the brain. u It's been pretty widely
demonstrated that the brain is modular and highly uniform/ 7 he says.
u There are certain broad stroke differences between humans and other
animals, but we can count the number of those on two hands. Yet humans
can speak and animals can't. That's a pretty big difference. And even the
variations that have been found in brain language areas like Broca's Area
don't hint at how language could emerge from the changes found. So
where is language? We've spent billions trying to track down its origins
and still can't find it."

Granger believes that the only real differences between animal and
human brains are size and connectivity, an argument he lays out in his
book Big Brain. u Humans have a lot bigger brains so we have much more
space for neurons to make connections, to link with other neurons." It's
in that space, in those extra connections, where Granger thinks language
emerges. If he's right, as his bot brains draw closer and closer is size
and complexity to human brains, language should start to emerge — and
Granger will get to watch it happen.

Of course, since neurobotics is a dragon-slayer's approach, there
are also a few scientists going after the biggest dragon. Just like Granger
is upping complexity to examine language, researchers at Imperial
College in London are doing the same thing for consciousness. U AII of
this work is comparable," says Granger, "because we're all modeling
cortical structures to build whole brain models with the intention of
seeing if higher functions like language and consciousness develop." And
if what they've discovered so far is any indication, then when it comes to
developing higher cortical function in neurobots, it's really not a question
of if, only u when." ®

CARL-1 has thousands of neurons and
millions of synapses that "are just about the
edge of the amount of size and complexity
found in real brains."

RESOURCES©

Richard Granger's Brain Engineering Laboratory

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rhg

Was That a Bot or a Human?

SURFDADDYORCA

With your shield gun pointing at the building ahead of you and your biorifle in
your holster, you see heavily armored, well-muscled computer game characters
running at you. They're coming at you in squads with team names like Thunder
Crash, Iron Guard, and Fire Storm. Your mission? Obliterate your opponents and claim the
Unreal Tournament Trophy.

But, who exactly — or what — is that
large pixilated dude coming after you in
the camouflaged flak jacket?

Epic Games 7 Unreal Tournament
2004 is a multiplayer FPS (First Person
Shooter) PC game that "combines the
kill-or-be-killed experience of gladiatorial
combat with cutting-edge technology/ 7
Users compete in "death match 77 teams
over the Internet for a prized Tournament
Trophy. Although there has been very little
research into the psychological and social
aspects of FPS games, existing studies
show the players are almost exclusively
young men (mean age about 18 years) who
spend a lot of their leisure time on gaming
(about 2.6 hours per day).

But young men are not the only
players. Gamebots (as opposed to Internet
bots or web robots) are a type of weak AI
expert system software used to simulate
human behavior in computer games such
as Unreal Tournament and its ilk: World of

SUMMER 2009

Warcraft, Guild Wars, Lineage, and Everquest - to name a few.
Each bot is a separate instance of an AI computer program. Bots
control pixilated characters that are often indistinguishable from
human characters.

Unreal Tournament 2004 is designed to be hacked so that
an AI program on a user's PC sends sensory information for a
character over a network connection. Based on this information,
the AI program decides what actions the character should take and
issues commands causing the character to move, shoot, and talk.
Project u Gamebots" at the University of Southern California's
Information Sciences Institute "seeks to turn the game Unreal
Tournament into a domain for research in artificial intelligence/ 7

It may seem odd that a shoot- 'em-up death match game
might be a breeding place for machine intelligence. The IEEE

the first bot to pass the Turing Test end up obliterating its
opponents in Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 2004?

Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) took
this notion seriously enough to host the first ever "BotPrize"
contest in December 2008 to see if a computer game-playing
bot could convince a panel of expert judges that it was actually a
human player.

The bots competing in the death match tournament were
created by teams from Australia, the Czech Republic, the United
States, Japan and Singapore. The judges included AI experts, a
game development executive, game developers, and an expert
human player. A $7000 cash prize was offered to the team who
could create a bot indistinguishable from a human player.

How did the judging work? Well, remember the Turing Test?
In 1951, Alan Turing wrote a famous paper in which he proposed

a test to demonstrate machine intelligence. Often characterized as
a way of dealing with the question of whether machines can think
(a question that Turing considered meaningless), the "standard
interpretation 77 of the Turing Test includes an interrogator or judge
(Player C) tasked with determining which of two players (Players
A and B) is a computer program and which is a human. The judge
is typically limited to using responses to written questions in order
to make the determination. In the case of the BotPrize, the judges
actually played against the other players and then rated them.

The results? You can judge the players yourself based on
short clips of the game's action posted on the Internet. It 7 s not
always easy. On a scale of 0 to 4 (4 is the most human-like), the
humans in the contest all scored higher than the bots (humans: 4,
3.8, 3.8, 3, 2.6; bots: 0.4, 0.8, 2, 2.2, 2.4). The winning bot team

AMIS, from Charles University
in Prague, managed to fool 2 out
of 5 expert judges, and achieved
a mean rating of 2.4. Startlingly,
one human competitor scored only
2.6, just two tenths higher than the winning bot. The AMIS team
did not win the $7000 prize: they were unable to pass the test by
fooling 4 out of 5 judges. However, they did take home $2000
for having the winning entry in the tournament. CIG 7 s BotPrize
contest is a variant on the Loebner Prize, an annual competition
started by philanthropist Hugh Loebner in 1991 that challenges
programmers to create a program that can pass the Turing Test.

Both the CIG and the Loebner prizes have yet to be claimed.
Will 2009 be the year? And will the first bot to pass the Turing
Test end up obliterating its opponents in Unreal Tournament
2004? Stay tuned. <§>

Surfdaddy Orca is another monkey with a laptop and a cell phone waiting for
Godot or the Singularity or whatever comes next.

RESOURCES ©

The 2I< Bot Prize
http://botprize.org

Short clips of the game's action
http://www.botprize.org/quiz.html

Slashdot

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/24/1657219

Unreal Tournament 2004
http://www.unrealtournament2003.com/ut2004/

University of Southern California Gamebots
http://gamebots.planetunreal.gamespy.com

The Appeal of Playing Online First Person Shooters (FPS)
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_
citation/0/9/0/5/0/p90505_index.html

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

From X PRIZE to
Singularity University:

An Interview with Peter Diamandis

ALEX LIGHTMAN AND R.U. SIRIUS

IZB

of cyberspace in the 1980s when he saw a bunch
of teenagers playing videogames while listening

to Sony Walkmen. In this interview, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis,
Chairman of Singularity University (Ray Kurzweil is Chancellor),
reveals that he got intimations of u the singularity" in 1993 when he
noticed people connecting to others by using their cell phones while
traveling underground on the D.C. subway.

Diamandis is a serial social venture entrepreneur. He was
born May 20, 1961, and graduated from MIT with his first degree
in 1983. His enterprises include International Space University, the
aforementioned Singularity University, Zero Gravity Corporation,
Space Adventures, Ltd., and the Rocket Racing League. Dr.
Diamandis 7 most famous and influential creation is the X PRIZE
Foundation, an educational, non-profit, prize-granting enterprise
that aims to use competition to inspire innovations that are good
for human civilization.

The $10 million the X PRIZE Foi

nsari X PRIZE competition inspired Microsoft co-founder

Allen to team up with Burt Rutan and create SpaceShipOne.
would win the competition by becoming the first non-governmen
funded spacecraft to reach outer space. The X PRIZE is no

h+: Why are you starting Singularity University?

PETER DIAM AN DAS: [laughs] It's something that needs to happen.
I am absolutely convinced that humanity is going to undergo some

ental evolution over the course of the next few decades. We're

are going to i

I feel that all

and all nations will have a role in the

ahead. And sometimes, key technology

fundamentally dependent on other bn

'ering concept might never

can't get the required

We want to create an ethos at Singularity University
for the founding of new companies that are right at
the birth of exponentially-growing fields. J J

fields of AI or

offered in a growing number of categories, including the heavil

publicized Progressive X PRIZE for automotive energy

We spoke to Diamandis primarily about Singularity University
According to SU materials, "Singularity University, based oi
the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley, is an interdisciplinar
university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire a cadri
of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the developmen
of exponentially advancing technologies (bio, nano, info, AI, etc>
and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity's gram
challenges/ 7 Their nine-week Graduate Studies programs start o
June 27 and their Executive Programs will start in the fall.

And it's important that there may be some ex-Soviet scientist in
Kazakhstan who's got a brilliant piece of technology sitting on
a shelf or some incredibly creative teenager in India who has a
missing piece of the puzzle. These days, of course, innovation and
breakthroughs can come from anywhere, so the interdisciplinary and

are what drove me to

h+:What do you intended to accomplish with
SU?

PD: The primary goal... primary targets to be
accomplished... are assembling a world-class

every year that will ultimately build a network
of future leaders who know each other, have a

h+:The article about SU in the S.F. Chronicle
emphasized SU as a locus for problem-solving.

Is that a priority?

PD: It's an important

clear. The first pri

I want to be very

that network of the top people in their fields.

that are important. One is that the st
to be the best in their individual fielc
not enough. The second part of the

that they really have to be

They have to be someone who is not passive, but
rather able to go and lead and create. And by the

it-graduate, your

leaders, the second goal is to teach them i

new companies. We real ly want to create an

at SU for the founding of new companies that are

extraordinarily p

these exponential ly-

world's biggest problems. We I

h+:The original term singularity, from Vernor
Vinge, relates to superhuman intelligence
emerging decades in the future. Why use the
word "Singularity" for this project?

PD: We had some discussion and debate

global, intractable

Bins — pandemics, about what we should name the university,
it might be. And the And, to be clear, the university is not about
ndle them is by wisely The Singularity. It's about the exponentially-

using the

h+: You mentioned intractable problems. It's
an interesting choice of words, since you're
trying to make them tractable. So in terms of
your own sense of being a visionary futurist,
and Ray Kurzweil being a visionary futurist
— do you think that the future people have
envisioned is in danger of being sort of
cancelled by one crisis or another?

PD: I think these transformative

are powerful and cannot be

be slowed down. For example, if you look at the
curves that Ray Kurzweil has shown for Moore's
law, it's a pretty consistent growth curve across
recessions, depressions and wars. The biggest

to do as much harm as they cc
technologies that we have at

that small groups of

can do

has been referred to as The Singularity.There could
be a multitude of futures. We'll find out. But for
me, when we talk about Singularity University, it's
really about these technologies and their ability to

University and others. But in

age to Ray and his work and his boo
sort of the formative document that
sed on this project, we called it SU.

a global with

h+: In terms of the Singularity, do you see a
relationship between Kurzweil's notion and
other people's notion of the Singularity, and
your interest in space, and then your work
with the X PRIZE?

PD: My interest in space is sort of encoded in
my DNA. It's my life's mission to open the space
frontier. But I remember a moment in early '93.
are I was in a subway in Washington, D.C. and I

right at the birth of these exponentially-growing extraordinary good or

wdb uribioppduie arid irreverbiuie. i wab seeing
Kurzweil's Singularity.

So when that hit me, that humanity was on a
mad dash to merge with or incorporate technology
in an irreversible fashion... that was the only
thing that caused me to momentarily take stock
of my space-focused vision. I was so enamored
with the concept, it got me to pause and wonder:
was opening the space frontier still of any value?

h+: And this is a big discourse among people
who feel that Singularitarian and other
technologies open up a virtual space that's
going to be so worthy that the physical space
is no longer as important.
PD: Sure. And of course, that will be a debate.

By the way, I had the pleasure of flying
Stephen Hawking into zero-G about 18 months
ago. I don't know if you read about that. If
you go to the website for my company, Zero G
Corporation (see Resources below), you can find
stuff there about it. We flew Stephen Hawking
into zero-G. It was a very successful flight. We had
huge media coverage around the world. So I asked
Hawking why he was doing this? And he answered
— before the media at the press conference —
that he believed that if the human race does not
evolve into space, we don't have a future. Because
there are so many problems — with asteroids,
pandemics, war — that we, effectively, have to
backup the biosphere.

So opening the space frontier is critical for
the purpose of backing up the biosphere, and for
getting access to the resources needed for the

™m+;.n,,->i u n f u.,™-,.n;+w a^a +u Q ir-,^+u ;-f

yuu iuuk di ii, ib d crurnu in d bupermdrKei nneu
with resources — the asteroids, the interstellar
materials and so forth. We have the ability to
have limitless manufacturing and limitless energy.
And we really need the raw resources required to
envision whatever might be possible.

Antecedents of Singularity University:

Unity in Diversity

ALEX LIGHTMAN

The Singularity University vision: Bringing together smart people from many disciplines
to seek and hopefully find common intellectual ground, and collaboratively brainstorm to
solve global problems with technology is exciting, though not unprecedented. In reflecting
upon what Peter Diamandis said during our interview, other endeavors reflecting similar
ambitions and approaches came to mind. While Dr. Diamandis cites only International Space
University as an inspiration, SU might be seen as one of a School of Schools of Schools.
Here are six that come to mind:

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: William Barton Rogers
incorporated MIT in 1861, and got it going in 1865 after the Civil War. The original proposal
includes sentiments that are remarkably similar, for something written 147 years earlier, to
the SU ideal. u The practical nature of the discoveries. ..of scientific inquiry has multiplied
almost infinitely the lines of connection between them. ..and these countless connecting
threads, woven into one indissoluble texture, form that ever-enlarging web which is the
blended product of the world's scientific and industrial activity/ 7

CLUB OF ROME: The Club of Rome was founded in April 1968 by industrialist and scientist
Aurelio Peccei in (it will come as no surprise) Rome. The Club of Rome commissioned The
Limits to Growth, a study/book that sold 30 million copies in 30 languages, and which
predicted collapse in the 21st century. A 2008 review determined that the predictions were
still on target.

SANTA FE INSTITUTE: Santa Fe, where I lived for five years, with its 120 art galleries,
is like Athens to nearby Los Alamos 7 Sparta, and the Santa Fe Institute combined the best
of both worlds. Established in 1984 by George Cowan and six others (five of whom were Los
Alamos scientists), the Santa Fe Institute focuses on interdisciplinary science seminars and
research. I gave it a nickname: Complexity University, and it has been influential in artificial
life and chaos research.

ASPEN INSTITUTE: Founded in 1950 and based in Washington DC with campuses in
Aspen and on the Wye River in Maryland, the Aspen Institute is highly regarded for bringing
together leaders from many fields to discuss interdisciplinary solutions to global problems.
Some of the best technology discussions on issues such as spectrum have taken place under
Aspen Institute auspices.

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED SYSTEMS ANALYSIS (IIASA):

IIASA was founded in London, 1972, to bring together the best scientists from east and
west in sort of neutral Austria. IIASA has focused on complex systems and how to negotiate
between different nations and professions to manage them.

COPENHAGEN CONSENSUS CENTER: Founded by Bjorn Lomborg, author of the
Skeptical Environmentalist, the Copenhagen Consensus tries to apply a sort of cost "return
on investment 77 analyses to solving global problems. The CCC is more financially oriented
than the other schools.

resources ©

Rogers, William B., Chairman, The Committee of Associated Institutions of Science and Arts, "Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology: including
a Society of Arts, a Museum of Arts, and a School of Industrial Science; proposed to be established in Boston" - Boston, 1861, and archived at the MIT
Libraries Collection, http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/pdf/objects-plan.pdf

MIT The Santa Fe Institute IIASA

http://mit.edu http://www.santafe.edu http://www.iiasa.ac.at

The Club of Rome The Aspen Institute

http://www.clubofrome.org/eng/home/ http://www.aspeninstitute.org

Copenhagen Consensus Center
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com

h+: What are some of the directions for the university, some areas of
study or some speakers that you think are the most exciting, or are the
most exciting for you, that will be coming up?

PD: Well, we have this partnership with NASA and with Google, and we're
in discussions with a number of other major high-tech companies in Silicon

h+: Earlier in the conversation, you were saying that you hoped people
who come to SU go on and start companies and projects and so forth.
Are you planning to do follow-through and maintain contacts with
people who participate in this?

PD: Oh,
to SU at

And we're going to be

with great business ideas... we're going to have a pitch da;
capital community at the end of the program. And we're
program we call the one percent club. So students who dor
of the equity of their company to SU will be given promin<

students who come up
ten day to the venture
we're also creating a

And CEOs, CTOs, CMOs of c

5 will come to get some of

V'P

h+: You should get a reality TV show, [laughter] Do you think the cost
of SU is justified? Some might compare the cost to TED, which is
$6,000 for four days. Is that a valid comparison and would you like to
explain the value that will be received by people who attend SU?

PD: Sure. The cost is similar to what we've charged for ISU for the last 20
years. It's a non-profit organization. So the cost is based on what it's going
to cost us to operate. We bring in people from around the planet and we'll
be giving an extraordinary experience. And the price includes housing and

food as well as tuition, so it's very reasonable. Plus we

at the end of the day, the students who come to SU are going
to plug in to a global network that is so extraordinary that I believe will be

from the Phoenix Lander that right below the surface is a permafrost. One
of the things we're doing here at NASA Ames is developing autonomous
robots and drills that can drill down into that permafrost. We learned from
Apollo that it's hard to drill on other planets. The rock characteristics are
different... and different in a way you can't predict.

We have already done a lot of work on autonomous robots, which is
the first step. Many of the Mars robots we've sent there have JPL on the
outside and NASA Ames on the inside, since a lot of the software has been
developed right here. ^fl

Next, we'll want to build self-replicating robots, and that's why
nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other technologies being
worked on at Singularity University are so interesting. When you start
looking at self-replicating robots, a biologist would tell you "well, we
already know how to do that. Those are called living cells. Microbes."
in particular. So one of the obvious questions is: Can we begin to take
existing microbes and engineer them to do things? And then, at some
point, can you actually create synthetic life that can be engineered to
extract the materials you need and construct environments?

We have a research group here at NASA Ames that is looking
at "extremophiles," life forms able to operate under highly extreme
conditions, such as close to the boiling point of water, or in highly acidic
conditions. These conditions may or may not represent exactly what
you'd find on Mars, but we've been able to extract these self-replicating
proteins and are beginning to figure out how you can replicate them to
manipulate metals to construct substrates, and maybe even grow an
electronic component.

h+: Are you talking about creating "synthetic life" that will
duplicate what's going on with biology?

PW: Yes. Eventually. But at first, we're just using what we've already
found in nature. In fact, there was an article the other day about using
viruses to create batteries, and that you can modify the genome of a virus
to construct battery leads (+, -), to create a kind of "nanobattery" using
the viruses.

So rather than using the current manufacturing process, where
somebody melts metal and pours it into molds and machines those parts
together into an electrical component, in the future, we'll use microbes
and proteins to "grow" them. In a cell, a particular genetic coding
manufactures a particular kind of protein that it links to build, say, a cell
wall. Well, supposing we modify that so rather than building a cell wall,
it builds a substrate for an electronic component. It might be a simple
modification to say, "OK, build this in a flat area." Then you have another
one that comes in and says "OK, every few microns we have an electronic
lead."

The next step — and this is one that is speculative — is creating
synthetic life. People like Craig Venter are beginning to do this. If we can
actually understand the programming languages of DNA and RNA, which
are basically natural computers that are able to replicate themselves, we
can, potentially, write code to do things.... It would be like software. So, if
nature hasn't already developed something that can build a brick, we can

instead program artificial life to build a brick. Now, that may be decades
away, but, maybe not. I mean, there are a lot of people working on this.

The next order of business, if we truly are going to "settle" another
world, is that we have to create some sort of environment that's more
hospitable than Mars' current surface conditions. Mars has less that
one percent of the Earth's atmospheric pressure (that's like being above
100,000 feet), and the temperatures and other extremes are pretty
substantial. People obviously can't live there.
h+: Enter "cyanobacteria"?

PW: Yes. Cyanobacteria is one of the earliest and most common life
forms on Earth. Maybe the earliest, having existed for over 3 billion
years. It's what converted the Earth's early atmosphere, which was a
reducing carbon dioxide atmosphere, to its current oxygen atmosphere.
Cyanobacteria are able to convert sunlight, in the presence of water and
a few other materials and carbon, into life, and it also produces other
carbon materials that can actually be used for fuel. In fact, they've already
programmed cyanobacteria to produce ethanol from photosynthetic life.
The life that exists today on Earth, including us, is supported by

Mars may already
be supporting life.J 5

these processes. So, one of the objectives is to determine if we can use
what we find there, or modify it, or create synthetic forms of life that will
enable us to operate on Mars, and convert its environment, at least on a
small scale.

In the near-term, on the Moon, which we're going to go to before
we go to Mars, we can begin to understand more natural alternatives
to using chemical reactors to clear the air, such as running air through
canisters of cyanobacteria that consume the carbon dioxide and release
oxygen. So, it's a scrubber. In the longer term, we'll want to see if we
can modify it to operate in different temperature ranges and radiation
conditions.

If we really want to settle Mars, and we don't want to have to carry
millions of tons of equipment with us to duplicate the way we live on
Earth, these technologies will be key. Ideally, at some point, hundreds
of years in the future or maybe sooner, people can go to Mars, and take
some seeds with them to plant in the Martian soil that will produce a
house and an environment they can live in. It's obviously going to be more
complicated than that, but that's the vision. ®

Lisa Rein is the Digital Librarian for the Timothy Leary Archives, a co-founder of
Creative Commons, and a consultant for Ray Kurzweii's Kurzweilai.net.

BIOSPHERE

An IntpmiPiAi lAiith Inhn Alio

RU SIRIUS

On September 26, 1991 eight men
and women climbed inside a
domelike enclosure about the size
of two and a half football fields to stay for
two years. Intended to function as a closed,
• human life sustaining ecological system, the
place was- a human constructed biosphere
— a Biosphere 2. The mission received
something close to the quantity of media
attention that was once reserved for manned
space flight, but the tone of some reports
had a "Hey, look at the weirdoes" quality.

While there were some problems (with
oxygen, for instance), the bionauts
(who included longevity expert Roy
Walford — a pioneer in caloric
restriction) managed to achieve their
goal of living in this closed system for
two years.

After making improvements to
the system, the Biospherians started a
second mission in March, 1994. They
intended to run ten months. But the
mission ended early with management
disputes and even accusations of
vandalism by some crew members.

It was all the vision of John Allen;
a visionary, engineer, adventurer,
avant-garde theater producer, systems ecologist and all-
around unique individual. Now Allen has told his story.

Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of
Biosphere 2 is a rambling, dense, charmingly told and
almost-linear life narrative. We follow Allen on adventures
in Vietnam (independently... in the middle of the war), in
Katmandu, through the countercultural worlds of alternative
theater in London, Paris, New York and Fort Worth, Texas,
and finally into the Arizona desert for the biosphere project.
Along the way, we meet a cast of characters that include
the likes of Bucky Fuller, Ornette Coleman, William S.
Burroughs, and Buzz Aldrin, along with hundreds of lesser-
known scientists, engineers, environmentalists, theorists
and performance artists, all ready to join Allen in attempting
to prove that there is more to life than its fragmentary
component parts. And sprinkled throughout the book are
Allen's thoughts and observations, related primarily to his
advocacy of "biospherics."

But let's let him tell it. I conversed with Allen about
Biosphere 2 and biospherics via email.

h+: You carried the Biosphere 2 vision for a long time. How does
a naturalist and adventurer find himself sending a crew into an
enclosed space for several years?

JOHN ALLEN: Actually, all naturalist adventurers work within a system
of tight parameters. In my case, I do this on our research ship the
Heraclitus on the Amazon or deep ocean, or on our Australia savannah
restoration project in the remote outback, or wherever — adaptability to
demanding and limited spaces is a necessity. In the case of the ship, the
"closure" of Planet Water [Earth] systems comes from gravity, not from
a glass or steel structure. While the crew of Mission One at Biosphere 2
spent two years inside Biosphere 2 without stepping outside, on a Moon
or Mars Base, one would go in and out of the enclosure on geological or
other expeditions.

h+: A lot of space scientists and NASA types contributed to the
Biosphere 2 mission. What was their interest?

JA: The interest of those scientists connected with NASA and space
exploration was in understanding the vectors necessary for humans to
live long periods in enclosed spaceships or on a Moon or Mars base. The
Russian, Japanese, Chinese and European space scientists were — and
are — highly interested, in many cases more than the American agencies
(unfortunately, I think). Russia, China, and Japan are all planning Moon
missions and we work with all of them on the requirements of such self-
sustaining structures. There's a lot of interest and ongoing exchanges
with American space people, but not at the top levels, because of their
emphasis upon the use of machines in space, and on sending up stored
supplies for the humans in orbit rather than developing a self-cycling
system. I think it will take another President with the vision capacity of
Kennedy to change this situation.

h+: What did the space scientists learn from Biosphere 2? Did you
get much feedback?

JA: NASA financed two meetings here at our base on Synergia Ranch
(in Santa Fe, New Mexico) and a number of NASA geological, Moon,
and Mars scientists have participated over the years at our Institute of
Ecotechnics conferences. Specific feedbacks relate particularly to best
crops to grow, waste recycling, stability of atmosphere composition,
oxygen levels, use of soils and how to make the best soils.
h+: Say a bit about how you view biospherics, and how it helps us
live better.

JA: Biospherics, the science and understanding of our total life-system,
(and any total life-system discovered or invented), helps us live better
because: 1) it helps us think better about our actual conditions; 2) it
educates our feelings to perceive complex, beautiful, dynamic forms; 3)
it helps our health because we get out more to see these wonders; and 4)
it stimulates inner growth by encouraging us to understand ourselves as
part of a marvelous evolution at home in the universe.
h+: There are arguments around that biospherics isn't really a
science. What would you say makes it a science?
JA: I first learned about this at Colorado School of Mines in Historical
Geology in 1953. Vladimir Vernadsky established it as a science in the
1920's after pushing biogeochemistry as far as it could go (he was one
of the founders of that science). The Earth's biosphere is the system that
is composed of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, soils and mucks, and all
the life forms on the planet. Biospherics is the name of the science that
studies Earth's biosphere and any other biosphere, including artificial
ones like Biosphere.

Mining engineers study it because different ore-bodies are I if e-

SUMMER 2009

They forget that Biosphere 2 was an experiment. We would learn from what
went as planned, and... even more from the few things that didn't.

formed and they can be located at different epochs of the evolution of the
biosphere and therefore found in the rocks associated with those periods.
For example, the Carboniferous formations contain coal. At least one
biosphere exists; anything that exists can be studied scientifically; the
name of this science is biospherics.

There is no valid argument that biospherics is not a science any more
than there is one that evolution is not a science. Unless, of course, one
adopts a political or religious ideology in order to gain position and power.
At the present moment evangelists oppose, by and large, evolution to gain
contributions from their audiences of bible literalists. Many powerfully
placed reductionist scientists oppose biospherics because they want to
be supported by government agencies and corporations that pay them to
specialize and even to oppose total system sciences that would expose
the problems associated with denying biospheric implications of a given
chemical or manufactured product. This is big-time money. Two examples
out of hundreds: scientist sell-outs pushing peasants off the land (Africa,
etc.) or cutting down forests for big-money soybean agriculture (Brazil,
etc.).

h+: You refer to Biosphere 2 as a success, but the media reports
at the time made it sound like a failure. What succeeded about
the mission and what failed... or at least showed off some big
problems?

JA: Mission One aimed for eight people to live and stay in top health for
two years in a closed life system modeled on a no-ice biosphere (which
has occurred in the past). It aimed for the life system to include seven
of the basic biomes of Biosphere 1, all of which would survive with an
increase of biomass, produce a high-yield chemical-free agriculture,
stabilize species numbers and maintain landscape diversity in the biomes
(the rainforest had a higher species loss), recycle 100% of waste (human
and animal), stabilize the carbon dioxide-oxygen cycle at levels below
those of concern for human health and recycle all air with a maximum loss
of 10% a year (a tightly-sealed space vehicle loses thirty times more).
And we promised to ensure full scientific monitoring by using a thousand
different sensors plus detailed field surveys and publish all the results in
peer-reviewed papers in reputable scientific journals and books.

Biosphere 2 succeeded in achieving all these objectives. One
unforeseen problem occurred: a decline in oxygen which was due to
carbon dioxide being sequestered in the concrete, contrary to engineering
predictions. Some scientists, especially those involved in mountaineering,
submarines, and space, thought this the most valuable part of the
experiment, since we were able to monitor the physiological response of
humans to a very gradual fall in oxygen occurring without a change in air
pressure. One point we established was that oxygen can fall in a closed
life system to sixteen percent with no noticeable effects on efficiency or
well-being.

We aimed at total self-sufficiency in food production, and wound
up with around 80% — we did set records for closed systems and high-
yield, non-polluting agriculture. The second crew achieved 100% food

SUMMER 2009

RESOURCES

sufficiency with the system improvements made during the transition
period between missions. And, of course, there were plenty of surprises
— like the desert beginning to transform into a chaparral ecology because
moisture levels favored that part of the original species selected. And
the rainforest grew so rapidly that our first generation pioneer species
were cut down during the transition - they had grown from small trees to
over 30 feet in height. But such developments added to our knowledge of
ecological self-organization processes.

Biosphere 2's biggest failure: not convincing the reductionist
scientists and expansionist politicians who control America to include
total systems sciences and engineering. This financial juggernaut and
its ideological demagogues fatally cripple efforts to deal with the huge
industrial and population expansion effects on our biosphere by restricting
evaluation of its effects by species or by water valley or by shoreline
or by city and country rather than by all effects on the total biosphere-
geosphere-technosphere-ethnosphere system.

So despite these remarkable achievements and the body of
knowledge that came out of Biosphere, there were elements of the press
that said because Biosphere 2 wasn't perfectly self-sufficient in the first
two-year experiment, and there were unexpected developments, that it
was a failure.

Of course, they forget that Biosphere 2 was an experiment- we did it
to learn about biospherics, confident that by doing something so radically
new, we would learn from what went as planned, and perhaps learn even
more from the few things that didn't. Biosphere 2 was also controversial
because — though it combined both holistic (total systems) science and
analytic (reductionist) science — it stirred up some opposition from some
reductionist scientists, some of whom were jealous of the popularity
Biosphere 2 achieved around the world, and others who simply don't
work with complex systems and couldn't understand the levels of science
possible in a facility like Biosphere 2.
h+: What are you doing now?

JA: My main line of new work is now in what I call cyberspherics — the
development of a total systems feedback set of operations ranging from
Chaos through Cosmos, Galaxy, Sun, Geosphere, Biosphere, Technosphere,
Ethnosphere, and Noosphere. It's an extraordinary intellectual adventure;
the age of Objective (Real) Science and Engineering is just beginning to
dawn. The settlement of Mars, even just one settlement, would carry
what we learned at Biosphere 2 and on the Moon landing into a true total
systems art, science, and engineering that could be applied with grace
and certainty to deal with our present crisis on Planet Water (a more
accurate term for what is usually called Earth).

Meanwhile our team still works in closed life systems, doing
research on relation of soils to agriculture in our small closed life system,
u The Laboratory Biosphere" in New Mexico. Some of the technologies
from Biosphere 2, such as wastewater gardens (constructed wetlands)
are being used at ecotechnic projects around the world and implemented
in a number of countries worldwide. €>

u The Laboratory Biosphere" Synergia Ranch Wastewater Gardens

http://www.globalecotechnics.com http://www.synergiaranch.com http://www.wastewatergardens.com

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

Real Discrimination

r i 1 r? * 1 1 1 Kli I

' 2006

STEPHEN EUIN COBE

IS? 8

"I must have lost almost half of my potential
contracts because the companies wouldn't
deal with an anonymous avatar."

Nam

Reside

^ Second lif e
Nation; i 27 , 68 ^

Sine,: 2007-04-27
Expiration; ff 0ne

vaag

U/JIf/fllttt

So says Scope Cleaver, a designer and architect inside Second Life.
Praised by New York Times Magazine for his design of Princeton
University's Diversity Building (the article headline: "Architectural
Wonders of the Virtual World/ 7 12/7/2008), his creations have extended
his reputation beyond Second Life and across several continents, but even
that can't protect him from what appears to be discrimination. U I offered
the companies a real world proxy who could sign all the papers, but it
didn't seem to help."

Some people see the freedom of anonymity that virtual worlds give
them as a nice perk. Others enter virtual worlds to promote their real
world selves, or projects, and avoid anonymity for their avatars as much
as possible. But for thousands, keeping their avatar's identity separate
from their real world identity is a serious philosophic matter. They believe
they should strive to be the people they are in their hearts and minds,
rather than the person suggested by features of their physical body that
are observable on the outside. After all, these external features were
forced on them. Ethnicity is the cliche example, but other accidents of
birth that either can't be changed — or can't be easily changed — include
age, gender, stature, attractiveness, nationality, social class, the accent
of their birth language, even regional dialect. None of these were chosen,
and they are impossible or difficult to change in the physical world. Calling
themselves Digital People, they design avatars that better fit their self-
image, and then use them to build reputations, personalities and social
circles that also better fit them.

Those who oppose this philosophy feel that Digital People present
a false self to the world — a grand and elaborate lie. Bad feeling has
accumulated as the result of social pressure and insults experienced
by Digital People. Even non-Digital People who mean well have shown
remarkable intolerance.

U I won't disclose names," Scope said. u What I'm talking about is
pretty sensitive. I'm awaiting feedback for a few jobs right now. Some of
these are recognizable corporate names, and it's international: France,
Germany, etc.

u Last year I had a German client; about $10,000 USD contract.
Lost it because they didn't trust an anonymous avatar.

u Many potential clients are expecting to talk to me on the phone
and sign Real Life documents. I tell them that I have two options. One
is total anonymity, which sometimes works because I have a pretty solid
reputation in Second Life and a recognizable name. The other is I offer
a Real Life proxy to sign all papers. Exactly the same as when people do
business in Real Life. It's binding. If something goes wrong, they can sue
him.

U I can't seem to find a way around it. It's very difficult to tell your
client you want to remain anonymous and then say, Hrust me.' They
immediately suspect something is wrong. Reputation and photos of past
projects is enough for some — it was for the Estonian Embassy, Princeton
University and others — but I could have worked for the biggest names in
SL if it wasn't for that obstacle."

SUMMER 2009

How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes. Don't Dis My Creds, Dro.

Soph rosy ne Stenvaag is the host of Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon, a series
of discussion events in Second Life. Her guests have included, in avatar
form, many noteworthy thinkers such as bestselling authors Robert J.
Sawyer, David Brin, Charles Stross, Catherine Asaro and Kim Stanley
Robinson. Sophrosyne experienced some in-your-face discrimination
from within the hallowed halls of academia.

"Last summer I attended a fascinating conference in a digital
world/ 7 Sophrosyne told me. "There was a lot of interest in keeping the
group together afterwards to build a digital community. Two of the three
sessions were run by academics with little experience in digital world
events. The moderators seemed to think that their high-level credentials
entitled them to deference from the pseudonymous masses around them.

"Events after the conference took a natural digital-world-style
turn: a democratic, collaborative desire to create the basis for an ongoing
community. I contributed a little organizing — networking people to
projects, and providing a few ideas for events. One of the conference
organizers emailed me, politely asking for my credentials. That's where
things got interesting.

"Basically, I told him: Here's my bio. Here are links to my portfolio,
my project website, my dozen or so digital presences — business blog,
personal blog, business and personal Twitters, business and personal Flickr
sites. Here's a list of references in business, academia, and government
that I've done project work for. I was applying a tribal standard: look,
here are the elders who can vouch for me, the assets I've acquired, the
measures of my standing in my tribe/ 7

But his take was: "I don't understand or value any of this. What
I need to know is your atomic name, and the names of the entities that
verified your intelligence and employability — schools and corporate
employers. That's what will let me determine if you are generally real and
trustworthy. He was applying an atomic standard: don't tell me personal
crap, give me your brains and dedication credit ratings from agencies I
respect. And it rapidly went bad from there."

"For me," Sophrosyne said, "reality and legitimacy were digital.
I was involved in a project that would affect my digital reputation. For
him, reality and legitimacy were atomic, and the project would affect his
atomic reputation."

This is the crux of the divide. Some people believe that the same tools

used to measure

For me, reality and legitimacy were digital. I was involved in a project that would reputation in the
affect my digital reputation. For him, reality and legitimacy were atomic. cm '-or "must

— be used in

a virtual world. And for Digital People this is an impasse. They won't
submit to that standard.

Second Life, and perhaps other virtual worlds, have evolved
reputation systems sophisticated enough to verify an anonymous avatar's
credibility. But as Sophrosyne points out, these systems aren't familiar
to most people alive today. Our tribal ancestors would not have been so
ignorant. They successfully used these community reputation systems —
these tribal codes —through hundreds of millennia. #

Digital People who rely less on non-digital people tend to experience
something more akin to confusion than discrimination. Extropia DaSilva
(a Digital Person who is also a transhumanism activist, essayist and text-
based public speaker) explained, "It is not uncommon for people to ask
out loud if I have Multiple Personality Disorder after I explain what a
digital person is."

Ivanova Shostakovich (a Digital Person who is also a virtual furniture
designer and the co-owner, with Peter Stindberg, of a Second Life store
called Greene Concept Furniture) emphasizes that discrimination is not
limited to the divide between the devoutly anonymous Digital People and
those avatars for whom anonymity is unimportant: "Most examples of
prejudice I have heard of in Second Life are between different cultural
subsets."

Hers is a valid point. Furries (avatars that resemble natural or
cartoon-like animals) still risk frequent harassment in public places;
and avatars that resemble children are banned in many SL locations
because of fear that some may be the creation of child molesters looking
for avatar-on-avatar sex. Small-breasted short women who want their
avatar to look like their real body have been subjected to insults and
discrimination based on this fear, as have people who wish to relive
aspects of their childhood by being an avatar child.

Discrimination today is pretty much universally frowned on. But
Digital People's rights are still subject to much debate, even in the most
techno-progressive circles. For example, when, in December, 2008, the
Order of Cosmic Engineers (a transhumanist organization of physical
people that holds meetings in Second Life because its membership is
global) accepted into its ruling body not one but three Digital People,
there was a passionate debate as to whether the new members could
vote. Since Second Life allows anyone to create any number of avatars,
without limit, for free, community members voiced concern that someone
who exists only as an anonymous avatar could vote twice by creating two
avatars. Despite the Order of Cosmic Engineers' respect and admiration
for the individuals in question, they decided to make the three Digital
People non-voting members.

Scope Cleaver doesn't seem to think things will change soon.
"I don't see it improving. There was a chat about this recently in the
Metanomics Group (ed: a group in Second Life that discusses business,

education, economics, science and policy in the metaverse: meaning all
virtual worlds, gaming or not, online and off). [Anonymous avatars] seem
to be a hot topic in SL related blogs lately. There sure seems to be a
movement toward untangling and shaping how people think about the
issue." When asked if the mood was mostly pro or anti, he said, "Anti,
especially when it comes to business."

World of Warcraft has seen discrimination too. On June 19, 2007,
Wired online reported that some guilds will not let players join unless
they use voice chat, because text-only chat "seems shifty."

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FOREVER YOUNG

BIO

ENHANCED

NANO

NEURO

HUMOR

It's a Big Mistake

to Overlook Mid-Range DANGERS

MIKE TREDER

Ever hear the saying that most people anticipate too much change in the short term
and too little in the long term? On the one hand, you'll hear complaints about u No
flying cars yet!" from those who've bought into silly hype. And on the other hand,
history is littered with definitive quotes from so-called experts who promised that one
advance or another was ''impossible" or would never happen.

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." - Sir John
Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, 1873

"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have
to be shattered at will." - Albert Einstein, 1932

"Landing and moving around on the moon offer so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science
another 200 years to lick them." - Science Digest, August 1948

But if too many people are looking for short term
exaggerated change, while at the same time, they aren't
fully comprehending the extreme changes that can occur
over the long term, there could yet be another reason
for worry. The middle range may be badly underrated
and might catch us by surprise — especially when it
comes to the impacts of advanced nanotechnology.

Let's define the short term as the next five years.
It's almost certain we won't have flying cars by then,
or a colony on Mars, or a pill we can take to cure all
diseases. Of course, we might be well on the way to
having online access everywhere all the time, and that
could be quite useful, but it's unlikely that people will
see anything within the next five years that will knock
their socks off.

What about the long term — say from 50 to 100
years? How much technological, social, and political
change should we expect to see in that time frame?
Given the vast differences in the world today — in all

three of those realms — as compared to the lives of
people from early in the last century, it seems beyond
argument that enormous changes are in store.

By the end of this century, if not before, many
millions or even billions of people will spend much of their
lives in nearly indistinguishable virtual realities. Fully
developed biotechnology and genetic engineering will
allow the creation of tailored plants, animals, chimeras,
and whole biomes. Advanced nanotechnology, well
beyond early generations of molecular manufacturing,
will completely revolutionize our infrastructures for
living, working, traveling, and creating energy on Earth
and in space.

All of that is predicated, however, on our ability
to get safely past the formidable barrier of the mid-
range — the period around five to twenty years from
today. What happens during the mid-range is very likely
to determine whether the remainder of this century
will be one of unparalleled abundance, devastating war

SUMMER 2009

and destruction, of warming-induced ecological collapse and mass deaths, or
perhaps some miserable but survivable combination thereof.

We can illustrate the challenge with this simple chart, (see below)
where we see an early period, the near-term, with levels of existential danger
somewhat evenly matched by our abilities to adequately manage and avert
the worst of those dangers. So far, so good.

Over the long term, our human/posthuman civilizations may be able to
acquire enough capacity through growth of technological aids and scientific
know-how that we can dependably stay ahead of the greatest dangers.

However, our fates, and those of all our descendants, may well be
determined by the underrated, dangerously overlooked time between 2015
and 2030. It is in that mid-range period, as we rapidly develop powerful new
technologies — and as we have to grapple simultaneously with huge new
problems caused by droughts, crop failures and famines, sea level rise, human
refugee migrations, structural unemployment, state failures, pandemics, new
arms races, and more — that we will be tested. In the mid-term, will find
out whether we are fit enough, mature enough, and wise enough to make the
right decisions.

Now is the time to begin making smart decisions — not when the barrage
of problems is upon us, but today. #

Fully developed biotechnology and
genetic engineering will allow the
creation of tailored plants, animals,
chimeras, and whole biomes.

Estimated Danger Potential vs. Response Capacity
^^^^H Response Capacity I I Danger Potential

Mike Treder, managing director of the Institute for Ethics
and Emerging Technologies, speaks around the world
on the complex interactions between society,
technology, and human nature.

2005

2010

2015

2020

2025

2030

2035

2040

2045

2050

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

FOREVER YOUNG

BIO

ENHANCED

NANO

HUMOR

t<3\

rj) V Q)

Running | — k
with the Dopes: L-r

Cheating to be
a Better Humaip-N

JAMES KENtVJ

odern humans are put in many moral conundrums,
but the most pernicious may be the conflict between
performance and ethics. In the modern world we
are expected to be productive for at least eight hours a day, and
that means being awake, functional, in a good mood, and ready
to perform without complaints. We have drugs and supplements
to make us more productive and efficient, and the industries that
supply those drugs are among the largest in the world. But while
these industries thrive, we are told that using drugs is unethical
and amounts to cheating. What is the modern performance-minded
human to do?

No matter what you want to achieve in a lifetime, there is a drug
to help you do it better and faster. Without coffee, the modern
eight-hour workday would be impossible. When we get stressed
and depressed from overwork and lack of sleep we turn to alcohol
or anti-depressants to wind down. When we feel pain we knock
it back with anti-inflammatory pills and keep going. We dope
ourselves to be more productive. We are told it's okay. We do it
without even thinking.

There's a pernicious aspect to all this — the lines between
enhanced performance and cheating have become blurred.
The adverse effects of chemical optimization are either grossly
exaggerated by politicians or quietly understated by industry flacks,
both using clever PR manipulation in order to pull bigger numbers.
We are allowed to use coffee and alcohol and prescription meds to
cheat our way through the modern day, but when we use steroids
or marijuana this is suddenly a scandal. The doping rules are
rigged and enforcement is arbitrary. The take-away message is,
u Be more productive, but don't get caught doing it with the most
efficient drugs: that's cheating." Welcome to the 21st century rat
race: move along as fast as you can or get run over, and we may
inspect your urine anywhere along the way.

All doping is rooted in two things — performance and
expectation. As modern humans, we're expected to perform
flawlessly. If we have performance flaws, we're told they can be
fixed — we can be normalized with treatments and medications.
The 20th century model said that patent pharmaceuticals and
psychotherapy held all the answers to the human condition. But

now being normal isn't enough. We 21st
century humans are expected to be super-
functioning, highly productive, multi-
tasking, and performance optimized. This
expectation is placed upon us by modern
media, culture, and economic pressures,
but we are naturally inclined to sleep most
of the day, have a big meal, fuck, and then
go to bed. If modern life were easy, we
wouldn't need to cheat, but it isn't easy.
We stress to find security, get depressed
about insecurity, feel anxiety, worry about

winning. If civilization is built upon the
pathology of achievement, we must embrace
the dope race for what it is, otherwise we
are criticizing the worth of progress itself,
and that totally jumps the paradigm. It's
easier to backtrack and say, u Win at any
cost, but don't get caught cheating..." than
to step back and ask, u What is the inherent
worth of winning, anyway?"

Vexed by civilization I once trekked to
a high mountain where a hermit lived and
asked him, u What value is progress?" The

like everyone else. Doping is always okay
if you are in a creative field like music,
performance, writing, art, or any part of
the entertainment industry. In fact, doping
is encouraged in this industry, and they have
award shows to celebrate notorious dopers
for their edgy genius. It's okay.

Doping is sometimes okay to help with
academic performance, and is perfectly fine
for anyone with a career in academia as
long as they keep their clothes on and don't
stumble or slur in public. Doping is tacitly

When your stock price goes down you must switch to alcohol, coffee,
and prescription opiates like everyone else. J J

the future, watch our bank accounts, keep
up with the news cycle, stay involved, and
hope we don't get hit by a stray asteroid.
Provigil, a drug that keeps you from getting
tired, is quickly becoming the new dope for
people too busy to waste life on sleep cycles.
Think of this as a symptom of our age: we've
embraced the anti-narcotic as an illicit post-
recreational drug. Stay awake and sober as
long as you can!

And why not? The undisputed truth
is that doping improves performance.
That's why they're called performance-
enhancing drugs. In a society obsessed with
performance, it's only natural we should
exploit them, but it would be wrong to call
this behavior anything but pathological.
Performance, achievement, and winning
are a form of dope, the main symptom of the
performance pathology being that winners
are never satisfied even when they're

old hermit lit a pipe and thought on it, then
nodded and gave me an answer. vv It keeps
people busy," he said. u But to what end?"
I asked. He thought on this some more, and
then an answer came to him. vv It makes them
feel like they matter," he said.

Since the doping issue can be tricky I
have come up with what I call the rules of
doping. These are rules that can be applied
to almost any situation. Doping is always
okay in life and death situations. This is an
unspoken truth. If you had to fight a bear,
swim twenty miles from a shipwreck, or
fly eighteen hours to drop a cluster bomb
on your enemy in a distant land, everyone
would agree that a little bump of speed is
fine, no worries there. Using cocaine for
job-related performance is okay as long as
your company is making money, but when
your stock price goes down you must switch
to alcohol, coffee, and prescription opiates

allowed for anyone in thankless performance-
critical jobs who don't get enough sleep,
like truckers, cooks, waiters, janitors, taxi
drivers, and air-traffic controllers. Doping
is never allowed in sports or competition
where other people's money is on the line,
unless the people with the money tell you
it's okay and then deny it when you fail your
blood test... in which case it's okay until it
isn't okay anymore, and that's all on you for
being a chump. Most of all, doping is usually
accepted when your ass is on the line, and
when other people's asses are on the line. If
you have a good excuse, people find it is easy
to forgive. But if you're doing it just because
you like to win? That's cheating. #

James Kent is the former publisher of Trip
magazine and editor of http://www.DoseNation.
com. Additional reporting by David Perlman.

WWW.HPLUSMAGAZINE.COM

Not all of Chris Conte's work

ynTii

Version 2

eti

Wherever I can, I always try to 1
use the highest quality materials
like medical grade stainless steel,
there's titanium on here, aircraft
grade aluminum and it's never really
going to tarnish.

The skull itself was started
as clay. I took castings of it
and turned it into wax. From
there I was able to fine-tune
it quite a bit, and had silicone
molds more recently made of
this skull.

will cost you an arm or a leg

Decodroid

Most of these are found parts. This is a dental clamp, this is
from a Singer sewing machine, these gears are from a clock, and
then the legs are all cast from a lost wax process from sculpted
components that I made.

Chronos

Version 2

I was lucky enough to get in contact with a couple of and so on. These guys saw my work and took me

guys who own an aerospace model shop, working as under their wing. They're master mold makers and

subcontractors to Northrop Grumman. They build they helped me construct the silicone molds needed

miniature models of aircraft for wind tunnel tests to cast this skull.

View more of Christopher Conte's work at http://www.microbotic.org

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— William O'Brien, Director of Cybersecurity
and Communications Policy at The White House

"Daemon does for
surfing the Web
what "Jaws" did
for swimming in
the ocean.

— Chicago Sun-Times

Experience the New World Order

by the New York Times
Bestselling Author Daniel Suarez

www.thedaemon.com

Wm Dutton | A member of Penguin Group (USA)

ON SALE NOW

Let A Hun

Futures Bloom:

A "Both/And" Survey of Tr^pshumanist Speculation

MICHAEL GARFIELD

ention the word "transhumanism" to most of my friends, and they will
assume you mean uploading people into a computer. Transcendence
typically connotes an escape from the trappings of this world — from the
frailty of our bodies, the evolutionary wiring of our primate psychologies, and our
necessary adherence to physical law.

However, the more I learn about the creative flux
of our universe, the more the evolutionary process
appears to be not about withdrawal, but engagement
- not escape, but embrace - not arriving at a final

solution, but opening the scope of our questions. Any
valid map of history is fractal — evermore complex,
always shifting to expose unexplored terrain.

This is why I find it is laughable when we try to arrive at a common vision of
the future. For the most part, we still operate on "either/or" software, but we
live in a "both/and" universe that seems willing to try anything at least once.
"Transhuman" and "posthuman" are less specific classifications than catch-alls
for whatever we deem beyond what we are now... and that is a lot.

So when I am in the mood for some armchair futurism, I like to remember
the old Chinese adage: "Let a hundred flowers bloom." Why do we think it will
be one way or the other? The future arrives by many roads. Courtesy of some of
science fiction's finest speculative minds, here are a few of my favorites:

By Elective Surgery & Genetic
Engineering

In Greg Egan's novel Distress, a journalist surveying the gray areas of
bioethics interviews an elective autistic — a man who opted to have
regions of his brain removed in order to tune out of the emotional spectrum
and into the deep synesthetic-associative brilliance of savants. Certainly,
most people consider choice a core trait of humanity... but when a
person chooses to remove that which many consider indispensable human
hardware, is he now more "pre-" than "post-?" Even today, we augment
ourselves with artificial limbs and organs (while hastily amputating entire
regions of a complex and poorly-understood bio-electric system); and
extend our senses and memories with distributed electronic networks
(thus increasing our dependence on external infrastructure for what many
scientists argue are universal, if mysterious, capacities of "wild-type"
Homo sapiens). It all begs the question: are our modifications rendering
us more or less than human? Or will this distinction lose its meaning, in a
world that challenges our ability to define what "human" even means?

Just a few pages later in Distress, the billionaire owner of a global
biotech firm replaces all of his nucleotides with synthetic base pairs as a
defense against all known pathogens. Looks human, smells human. ..but
he has spliced himself out of the Kingdom Animalia entirely, forming an
unprecedented genetic lineage.

In both cases, we seem bound to shuffle sideways — six of one, half
a dozen of the other.

By Involutionary Implosion

In the 1980s, Greg Bear explored an early version of "computronium" —
matter optimized for information-processing - in Blood Music, the story
of a biologist who hacks individual human lymphocytes to compute as fast
as an entire brain. When he becomes contaminated by the experiment,
his own body transforms into a city of sentient beings, each as smart as
himself. Eventually, they download his whole self into one of their own —
paradoxically running a copy of the entire organism on one of its constituent
parts. From there things only get stranger, as the lymphocytes turn to
investigate levels of reality too small for macro-humans to observe.

Scenarios such as this are natural extrapolations of Moore's Law,
that now-famous bit about computers regularly halving in size and price.
And Moore's Law is just one example of a larger evolutionary trend: for
example, functions once distributed between every member of primitive
tribes (the regulatory processes of the social ego, or the formation of a
moral code) are now typically internalized and processed by every adult
in the modern city. Just as we now recognize the Greek Gods as embodied
archetypes correlated with neural subroutines, the redistributive gathering
of intelligence from environment to "individual" seems likely to transform
the body into a much smarter three cubic feet of flesh than the one we are
accustomed to.

Greg Egan
http://gregegan.net

Greg Bear

http://www.gregbeai

SUMMER 2009

Charlie Stross

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/

Arthur C. Clarke
http://www.clarkefoundation.org

Stephen Baxter

http://www.stephen-baxter.com

1 +

Then again, there might be systemic constraints to just how far tech will take us. Charles Stross' Glasshouse offers a rare
perspective on the possible consequences of nanotechnology: once we all rely on computers to back ourselves up and store

I ourselves for interstellar transit, those computers become the targets for a new level of informational warfare. In a world where
people can be rebuilt at whim, murder is effectively obsolete. No one can be killed, but everyone is at constant risk of being
hacked. Suddenly you wake up working for the enemy, and loving it. Selective memory erasure programs saturate the network
and prevent any further development from crossing communities and achieving universality. History is routinely wiped, so no new
wisdom can accrue. Once again, humanity is splintered into countless isolated physical and mental regions, and some of them
respond by choosing to eschew high technology entirely, living and dying on the clock of some long-forgotten world.

In other words, what we normally imagine as a linear continuum might instead be a wave of progress that ebbs and flows,
a cycle of Light and Dark Ages distributed capriciously through space-time.

By Hyperdimensional Intervention

The idea that humankind will be "initiated" into a new and higher mode of being by some other race of transcendental entities
has been circulating for thousands of years. Perhaps there is a common trajectory for the development of sentient species, and
we receive intermittent, minimally-intrusive guidance by those who came before us. It is an idea that has certainly found its way
into common sci-fi discourse — be it through Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 or Stephen Baxter's Manifold. Were we to take seriously
the growing ranks of exopoliticians, exobiologists, and exolinguists, this in fact is happening. Descartes was given his famous
plane — practically the emblem of rational modernity — by an angelic vision. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the double helix)
and Carey Mullis (pioneer of the Polymerase Chain Reaction) both admitted to interfacing with LSD when their Nobel Prize-
winning finds came to them. Crop circles form overnight in muddy fields with no footprints, bearing strange radiation signatures
and seeming to encrypt dense information about the structure of the quantum vacuum and the movement of celestial bodies.
This pattern is almost universal among species-changing creative eruptions (or are they irruptions?) throughout history; even
Moses had his burning bush. In every instance, these revelations drew our species closer to what we might call transhuman.
We're "getting the message/ 7 but who is doing the talking?

By Natural Quantum Evolution

One option in particular seems to get short shrift by a community that tends to believe we will lift ourselves up into a posthuman
order by our own bootstraps... but if the future even modestly resembles the past, then we cannot neglect the possibility that
nature will do the heavy lifting for us. Recent research at UC Berkeley and Washington University has demonstrated that
photosynthesis is 95% efficient because it uses quantum computation to retroactively decide upon the best possible electron
paths. Johnjoe McFadden at the University of Surrey has suggested that this very same process may have been how life emerged
in the first place, and other scientists have noted similar, strangely intelligent mutation responses in lab cultures. Egan's novel
Teranesia runs with this new model of "smart evolution/' suggesting that we may see posthumanity spontaneously self-organize
out of the quantum superposition of all possible futures — as if good ideas reach backward in time to organize their necessary
histories. Given the uncanny prescience of some sci-fi speculation, this might not be too far from the truth.

All Of The Above

As our options increase, humanity — and whatever else might call us their ancestors — will probably continue to take every
form available: flesh, metal, and software; post-linguistic and pre-linguistic; evolution by self-mastery and deus ex machina. If it
can happen, it probably will. This is the world in which we live, and every step we take into the future makes that increasingly,
painfully obvious. Transhumanism, as best as I can define it, is the story of "and."

Essayist and evolutionary theorist by day, live painter and guitarist by night, Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally
art, science, and spiritual practice. Links to his music, writing, and imagery can be found at http://www.myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

EVERYTHING OF THE DEAD:

Hie Fifinire of ijjjnanit

l\lfc< MAMATAS

9 i

1 #

In Resident Evil 5, the latest in the series of
multimedia adventures about corporate greed and
zombie apocalypse, you act out some postcolonial
violence against hundreds of black bodies... or die
trying over and over again. In Call of Duty: World At
War, a patch turns Nazi opponents into Nazi zombie
opponents. Zombie novels litter bookstores like so
many wayward limbs, including the recent porno mash-
up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. George Romero,
the grandpappy of the modern zombie menace, will
be releasing his latest film this year (or maybe next),
and it is called ... of the Dead. And in those three little
dots are competing visions of posthumanity. Like the
socialists sang over a century ago, u Whose Side Are
You On?" The iconic zombie horde isn't just a stand-in
for a terrifying undifferentiated Other, but a symbol of
how we might shamble and shuffle toward liberation.

"You can have my brain
(and my canned goods)
when you pry them out
of my cold dead hands!"
is only a part of zombie
anxiety. J J

For Romero, a political radical whose Night of the Living Dead was made
during the upheavals of the late 1960s, the zombies were a new world
rising up against the old. The cannibalism of the undead was comment on
exploitive social relations made flesh. As bad as the zombies were, the

small-town racist
cops were that
much worse. But as
the 1960s went, so
too did the zombie.
For many readers
and viewers of
zombie stuff, the
zombies are what
you practice on
while preparing
for the real uprisings to come. u You can have my brain (and my canned
goods) when you pry them out of my cold dead hands!" is only a part of
zombie anxiety — those cold dead hands may rise up and join the other
side, after all. #.

The zombie was once a servant, animated through the spiritual
prowess of the vodou bokor. A zombie was someone who had wronged the
community (or the bokor) and had been cast out, reduced to shambling,
asocial slavery. A zombie was less than human. Romero's vision of the
zombie, the vision that has influenced popular culture for the past forty
years, is a transhuman vision. And zombies continue to evolve. There
are zombie banks now, institutions that are worth nothing but continue
to shamble through the economy thanks to government subsidy. 28
Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead showcased fast
zombies, and zombies with a measure of intelligence and internal lives *
can be found in novels such as Dying to Live by Kim Paffenroth and David
Wellington's Monster series. The zombie superheroes in the Marvel
Zombies series are also smart, or at least chatty.

And people want zombies. Zombie-themed flash mobs have littered
the United States and Europe for the last few years. Zombie message
boards discuss not only the film and fiction, but bleed into survivalist
strategies and rhetoric. It's no surprise that the Austen pastiches, the
deadpan advice books, the video games seek to rewrite both the future
and the past to include the zombie apocalypse. Zombies appear to be
unalterably Other, just mindless consumers and reproducers of themselves,

but they needn't be. Reducing the zombie to a mindless Other despite the
evidence — teamwork, learning, tool use, a rather brutal sense of irony
— is a human problem. (After all, there's no reason to believe that any
living person you might meet on the street really has a rich internal life.)
Recognizing the agency of the zombie is a posthuman solution.

In the traditional post-Romero zombie narrative, the characters who
escape the zombies often find themselves confronting a corrupt human
authority even worse than the undead... and not nearly as competent,
despite supposedly still being in possession of their brraaaaaaiins. For
example, in Max Brooks' World War Z, a novel in the form of an oral
history recorded in the wake of an outbreak, it's Tibet and Cuba who are
the "winners," while the United States has all but collapsed thanks to its
own bureaucracy and political corruption (and zombies).

What makes the zombie posthuman is the elimination of human
limitations intrinsic in the state. Everything is explicit in a zombie hoard,
arcity, the thousands of implicit rules and social agreements that keep
L from fulfilling all of our needs, failures of health and stamina, the
's monopoly on force, these all go by the wayside. Zombies will wear
onkey suits th& wer^buried in, or the tattered uniforms of their old
■pbs, but they don't have to dress to impress or keep up appearances.
Romero's 2005 film TheukMofthe Dead features a Utopian high-rise
kept stocked by raids across the river into nightmarish zombie territory.
Then the zombies learn to walk under water and the Utopia crumbles

into... not a dystopia, but a new and different Utopia — one

p^the

zombies. ^

Back during the last Great Depression, when the Next World War
was still being plotted out in the backrooms and mass-minds of Europe
and Asia, anthropologist Robert Briffault wrote, u It is nota new economic
system or a social order which is being forged and which menaces
traditional civilization. It is a new humanity." In a zombie apocalypse,
there are only two choices. Go down fighting, and not for humanity but
rather for canned goods and isolated mountain cabins. Or you can find
the awe within the horror, the freedom of a sort that can only be enjoyed
by former slaves, and do what George Romero once said he'd do if the
zombie apocalypse came to his door: go out and get bitten. ®

Nick Mamatas is the author of the short story collection YOU MIGHT SLEEP... and
many other things, http://www.nick-mamatas.com

It's not too often that yo
a guy from the top of the Empire State
Building, dust yourself off, run up the side
of another building, leap off, and glide across
the city.

Playing Prototype, an open-world video
game developed by Radical Entertainment, you
find yourself in the midst of a viral outbreak
in New York City. Rather than making people
sick, this particular virus turns them into
monsters that, in turn, gobble up the uninfected.

aturally, the U.S. government's behind it
all, which explains the presence of Marines
and a secretive Special Forces unit called
BLACKWATCH amidst the chaos. You play as
Alex Mercer, who comes skulking through the
city equipped with a grey hoodie, a cool jacket,
and a bevy of virus-fueled super-powers — not
to mention a bad case of amnesia.

Radical Entertainment's Dennis Detwiller
and Eric Holmes came up with the idea of
Alex and Prototype following on their success

An Interview with Dennis Detwiller about Prototype:
A Way Dark Experiment in Gaming u TranshumanisnV

with 2005's The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate
Destruction. That game allowed players to
wander a city as the rampaging comic book
anti-hero, taking the open-world genre to new
limits. (Open-world or "sandbox" games let
players choose their own course, rather than
following scripted missions.) Detwiller and
Holmes decided to push things even further with
Prototype by introducing themes of conspiracy
and transhumanism, and by removing any
mic-book morality.

muc
ish
and

When they say Alex is an anti-hero, they
mean it. Much of the player's progression in the
game depends on his devouring other people,
much as the game's monsters do. Eating people
is how Alex gains skills, augments his powers,
and learns about his past.

Detwiller is Prototype's Senior Designer.
He wrote most of the game's backstory, all of
its cinematics, and several of its missions. H+
asked Detwiller to elaborate on the thinking
behind the game.

h+: Prototype takes its anti-hero theme pretty
far. How did you frame this approach for the
higher-ups at the publishing company?

DENNIS DETWILLER: The original pitch was "This
is a monster movie. This is like The Thing, except...
you're the Thing/ 7 So many people had been pitching
games from the other angle that we took a lot of
people by surprise. The first reactions were u No way!
No one will want to do that/ 7 The second reactions
were, u 0h wow. That might be good. 77

h+: Aside from monster movies, what other
touchstones did you use to flesh out Alex?

DD: We looked at a lot of different sources. It was
bizarre. We looked at Taxi Driver. That was one
influence. We really like Taxi Driver. We really liked
The Thing. We basically just said, u What if Travis
Bickle was the Thing? 77

h+: Playing Travis Bickle as a science fiction
monster demands a certain setting. Once you'd
settled on the main character, how did you
develop the game's story?

DD: It was clear from the beginning we didn't want a
u save New York 77 story— it's just boring. We wanted
a really, really dark kind of game. You're not sure if
you want to root for the main character or not, but
it's a hell of a lot of fun playing him. Alex is not a
moral person, because as Eric puts it, if you give a
player a balloon in an open world, they're not going
to play with it, they're going to pop it. Eric wanted
to build an experience where the game would tailor
around the concept of you literally doing whatever
you want, and more often than not what that is, is
something awful.

I just squeezed that into a story that told you
something about Alex. So the entire story is geared

around Alex discovering exactly what happened to
him, what caused all of this — and that's it. Whether
he saves New York on the side? It's a possibility, but
it's not by any means the center of the story.

h+: If there's no moral arc provided by the game,
what motivates the player to keep playing, to
learn more about Alex?

DD: The idea of Alex transcending humanity was
very strong in the story. By the end of the game,
Alex has consumed hundreds of people. He's literally
an agglomeration of a hundred minds, a hundred
lifetimes. A hundred different people, all skewed
into one. He can pilot helicopters and tanks, use
any weapons, because he's consumed all of these
people... he has all of their memories. That was a
strong theme we wanted to hit.

The opening cinematic says, u There was
once an idea of an Alex Mercer, a body linked to a
particular name, a series of letters that meant one
unique thing, one being, one mind, but I'm past all
that now."

What we wanted was... you begin as a blank.
You discover some really awful truths about who you
were, and then you realize it probably doesn't matter,
because you're no longer human. You're something
bigger and something worse and something scarier.
We didn't want to shy away from that. We didn't
want a pat ending: u You're cured!" or u Don't worry
about it!" or u It 7 s no big deal! You did everything
right! Good job!" It 7 s more that you find out some
horrible truths.

h+: These "horrible truths" have both in-game
and real-world implications. What out-of-game
ideas does Prototype get across?

DD: This idea that the government is willing to cut

Why limit a character? Why do you pay $70 to bu
a game that tells you, "You can't do that"?

nd as you understand Alex better, he doesn't necessarily
me more sympathetic.

he learns what the government's doing, he also learns that
re not the worst [laughs]. There are worse things out there, and
part of that. He's not entirely clear of all blame.

h+: Betweenthe governmentand Alexand the monsters, Prototype
seems bleak. How do you draw players into that environment?

DD: All of our references are dark. None of them are happy-go-lucky.
At the same time, we also wanted to apply transhumanism as a power
fantasy — and a power fantasy to a degree never seen in a video game
before. That was very important. We basically just said, u Why limit a
character?"

Why do you pay $70 to buy a game that tells you, u You can't do
that"? That's what life is all about. You spend your entire life being told
you can't do things. When you're playing a video game, the goal of the
game is to transcend your normal limitations and it should let you do
what you want to do.

We built a game that was the realization of every dark power
fantasy you've ever had, and we just kind of put it in the controller and
let the player do what they want with that. And they won't be judged.
That's the important distinction. Many other games will allow you to do
dark things and then impose some sort of penalty on you or judge you.
I've always thought that was really foolish.

h+: You're giving players the experience of being an enhanced
human set loose among ordinary people. How does Prototype
encourage players to reflect on that experience?

DD: What we didn't want to do was make the moral choice for you and
we didn't want to make the moral judgment for you. We wanted to put
you in a situation where you couldn't help but notice that you'd made
a moral choice and that moral judgment is coming from you, nowhere
else. It's u 0h my God! I just killed a bunch of Marines! They were just
trying to stop the attacking Thing!"

The game doesn't stop you. The game doesn't punish you, but the
reactions and the dialogue might give you pause. As you see the game
play out, you start to learn more about what the Marines are doing
there. You might start to feel bad about what you're doing. It's up to
you. Prototype will appear for Xbox360, PlayStation 3, and PC in late June.®

Ray Huling is a freelance journalist living in Boston. He is working on a book about
shellfishing in Rhode Island.

^ RECOMMENDED

7 BOOKS

Transhuman

MARK L. VAN NAME AND
T.K.F. WEISSKOPF

Baen (paperback)

..'. J'.:/. '. { IS-lH i.J

Science fiction has explored the
future evolution of humanity since
Olaf Stapledon, but in recent years the
concept of the Singularity has given it
new energy. Leading SF publisher Baen brings us an anthology
of original stories by Hugo award winner David Levine, old pro
James Hogan, Wil McCarthy and eight others, all tackling the
topic from different angles but with a shared optimism. The
introduction and the first three stories are available free on the
publisher's website. -Jay Cornell

WHERETO BUY

uman-Mark-L-Van-Name/dp/141659146X/ref=sr_l_2?i
1241461728&sr=l-2

The Unincorporated Man

DANI KOLLIN AND
EYTAN KOLLIN

Tor (hardcover)

A very sharp and often funny look at a
21st Century man who is resuscitated
from cryogenic storage only to
find himself in a tightly-controlled,
techno-bean-counter socio-economic system. This novel may
remind some of Heinlein — for both its clarity and its implicit
individualist, libertarian satirical slant. -ru sinus

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nincorporated-Man-Sci- Essential- Books/

Nightmare in Silicon
^ m COLETTE PHAIR

4 Chiasmus (paperback)

NlGHTflARE

in Silicon

A highly interior, marvelous short novel
Cflixni: Pun** written from the point of view of a woman
who — facing imminent death from illness — becomes the first person
to have her consciousness transferred to a robot body. This will not
appeal to hard tech types and transhumanist literalists, but as Alan
Moore wrote, it is "recklessly brave and driven writing, brimming with
fluorescent style and startling ideas." - ru sinus

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TECHNOLOGY'S
PROMISE

Technology's Promise: Expert
Knowledge on the Transformation
of Business and Society
WILLIAM E. HALAL

Palgrave Macmillan (hardcover)

i - - 3|| '*■■"-.

This is a truly fascinating book that deals
brilliantly with the co-evolution of technology,
business and society. A concise but complete "history of the future,"
written by a respected scholar, consultant and public speaker and based
on information from a panel of 100 futurists, it covers most scientific and
technological fields, with specific scenarios until 2050 and with general
ideas for the future of humanity. - Jose cordeiro

WHERETO BUY

ys- Promise- Knowledge-Transformation-Business/

Wired For War: The
Robotics Revolution and
Conflict in the 21st Century

P.W. SINGER

Penguin Press (hardcover)

Singer has written extraordinary and
exacting books about child soldiers and
the "privatized military industry" (which is a nice way of saying
mercenaries). Now he turns a withering eye toward the realities
and terminator possibilities of robots at war. - ru sinus

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SUMMER 2009

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well
Forever

RAY KURZWEIL AND TERRY
GROSSMAN, MD

Rodale (Hardcover)

tcuca-

WHAT DOEMJT

L/V/ng Healthier and Longer —
What Works, What Doesn't
CARL BARTECCHI, MD AND
ROBERT W. SCHRIER, MD

Online

A follow up to Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, Transcend is chockablock with advice, not just about nutrients, but about exercise, eating,
stress relief, and much more. On the other hand, if you want a skeptical view regarding using lots of supplements to overcome age-related damage, you can check
out Living Healthier and Longer. The authors say the evidence shows that antioxidant supplementation and taking doses of vitamins above the "Recommended
Daily Allowance" may be harmful. Will the correct authors please stand up on their 125th birthdays? -ru sinus (with thanks to Ben scariato)

WHERE TO BUY

;om/s/ref=nb_ss_gw_lJ??uH=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&^
longerlife.org

LIVE LONGER, LIVE BETTER

n R Z W E 1 L

TERR* GR0SS

"Kurzweil and Grossman provide a remarkably thorough and
enjoyable program to optimize your health. If you want to
have the greatest chance of seeing the next century, read
Transcend today. Ray Kurzweil Knows more about the future
of technology than anyone on the planet 11

— Dean Ornish, MB, founder of the
Preventive Medicine Research Institute and author 0/The Spectrum

Amazing discoveries in medicine and technology promise to reverse
aging, extend your life span, and maintain your vitality forever. From longev-
ity experts and best-selling authors Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman,
MD, TRANSCEND is the practical, easy-to-follow wellness program for
taking full advantage of the cutting-edge technologies of today— so
that you'll remain healthy and be able to take full advantage of the biotech
and nanotech miracles of tomorrow. .

J| ROD ALE

r YtiU'H WHGLI ■

Dedicated to promoting understanding,

interestand participation infieldsof emerging
innovation that can radically benefit the
human condition.

Mark your calendar
for the h+ Summit:

Adventures and Enhancements,
Los Angeles, California, Dec. 5
and 6, 2009!

Learn about how to make your
future bigger, brighter and
smarter!

www.humanityplus.org

We are called to be architects

of the future, not its victims.

-R. Buckminister Fuller

If we all worked on the assumptions
that what is accepted as true
is really true there would be
little hope of advance"

-Olivia Wright

AI FOREVER YOUNG BIO ENHANCED NANO NEURO

HUMOR

RELINQUISHMENT,

Step ONE

JOE QUIRK

Okay, if we're going to get started on this relinquishment thing, somebody
is going to have to suggest the first baby step. It's all well and good for
Bill Joy to suggest we immediately stop the infotech innovation that made
him rich, but so far I haven't heard any practical steps on a realistic timetable.
So I'm going to make a suggestion to get the ball rolling backward.

This might seem like a weird one because cell phones have not been invented yet. They're just
marketing all the prototypes. Here's a list of amenities an actual cell phone would have:

It won't bleep out every 30th word.

It won't hang up on you at its discretion.

It sounds at least as good as the walkie-talkie I used from my tree fort in 1975.
It includes the most information-rich part of a conversation: the breath between the
words that cues the user's intent to speak or listen.

AI J FOREVER YOUNG BIO ENHANCED NANO NEURO

HUMOR

I'm trying to prevent this futuristic device from being invented by
convincing you to relinquish the primitive prototype in your pocket.
Why?

The first sign of Singularity Shock is when information technology
changes so fast that the average human brain can no longer keep pace,
causing intolerable cognitive dissonance and, eventually, madness. Slower
brains are canaries in the coal mine, and I'm here to squawk.

Here are a few examples of intolerable cell-phone-induced cognitive
dissonance:

Twice a month, I get a cell phone call from my buddy's balls. I turn
on my answering machine and listen to twenty minutes of his testicles
rustling around in his pants while in the muffled distance I hear him talk
baby talk with that psychette he told me he broke up with. Sometimes his
nads catch me when I'm home. I listen live while I holler into the phone
for him to take me off his damn speed dial. Eventually he hears my tiny
voice screaming from his scrotum and claims I'm not on his speed dial.

Twice a month, I get a
cell phone call from my
buddy's balls.

But that would mean that during the hundreds of thousands of steps he
takes each month, his baubles randomly type out my phone number and
hit send every two weeks, like a ten-thousand-monkeys-on-typewriters
kind of thing.

I should point out my friend wears saggy homeboy jeans — which
I call incontinence pants — with his baseball cap on sideways, and an
overlarge shirt with a giant number and somebody else's name on it, an
ensemble that sends a rebellious message of mental retardation. I'm not
judgmental about this, except that his incontinence pants place his cell
phone in proximity. I don't know about you, but when jingleberries dial
me up making sounds as if to demonstrate Newton's Cradle in my ear, I'm
way past the point of psychological overload. It's time to turn back now.
Second example of cell-phone-induced Singularity Shock:
I was alone in the men's room using the urinal. I heard somebody
walk in behind me, step into a stall, and latch the door. He jingled his belt,

sighed, and said:

u Hey, how are you doing?"

I looked around to double-check that we were definitely alone.
u 0kay, I guess."

U I just stepped into the men's room."

u Yeah, I figured."

u So how's it going?"

u Um ... everything's coming along fine."

u Where are we getting dinner afterwards?"

u Look, guy, I'm straight."

u Hang on a second, sweet pea. Hey out there! Leave me alone! You
want me to call the cops right now?"
u 0h! No-no! Sorry!

u No, it's okay. Just some pervert. You were saying?"

The advent of the cell phone age has provoked an assault on our
most cherished values, including the ancient taboo against discussing
dinner plans while defecating. Next time you borrow somebody's cell
phone, remember your Handi Wipes.

I hope this story inspires you to chuck the damn thing into the
recycle bin and join Bill and I in our journey back to the seventies, where
we embrace the following technology: A call-waiting enhancement that,
instead of interrupting your conversation, sends an automatic message
to the caller telling them you are busy right now and to please call back
later. No interruption, it doesn't charge the caller for the call, and the
responsibility for making contact remains on the person trying to contact
you. Sound convenient? We had that in 1975. It was called the busy
signal.

We don't even need to go back that far. I'll settle for any
relinquishment back to the time before I received messages like this on
my message machine:

u Joe it's ... bit ... meet us at ... o'clock ... All the lobster and steak
you can eat, pro bono strippers, plus ... mrl ... call her back at 51 ... 3 ...
28. Okay, I'll expect you there!"

Relinquishment, Step Two:

Talking GPSs. Shut the hell up. I'm trying to figure out where I am.
If I wanted my masculinity threatened by a voice telling me where to turn,
I'd bring my wife. ©

Joe Quirk is the bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction. His new novel, EXU LT,
is the very first digital ebook published exclusively at Scribd by a mainstream
author. You can buy it for two bucks, http://www.scribd.com/doc/15582558/
EXULT-by-Jow-Quirk

SUMMER 2009

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